Cuba, why is our policy toward this neighbor derived from the politics of 65 years ago?

Musings

Cuba is our neighbor lying approximately 90 miles south of Key West, Florida. Our close involvement with Cuba goes back to the Spanish American War in 1898 At that time we forced Spain to relinquish the colony and  Cuba became independent although there was an American military occupation which was withdrawn. Cuba then became an American playground in the tropics and a neighbor which otherwise was generally thought of popularly by the American people. In 1952 the Cuban government was overthrown by Fulgencio Batista who became the dictator of the country. His government was corrupt and essentially favored his friends and Americans that brought enough money and business into his country. He was not popular. He was overthrown in a revolution in 1959 led by Fidel Castro. With that revolution it became clear that he was a socialist and would pursue socialist policies. The American political reaction was to declare him a communist and begin sanctioning the country to try and force him to be overthrown in a successive revolution. That did not work. Our policy towards Cuba is still based on that sequence and it seems to be nonsensical.

Contemplations

As Fidel Castro and his supporters took over the country from Batista, Batista fled to Spain and those people who were closely tied to Batista and those entrepreneurs with larger businesses in Cuba who feared that they would be prosecuted by the new government fled to the United States. The end result was a considerable migration, mostly to Florida, by wealthier Cubans and those who otherwise feared the new government.

At the time the United States was very diligent and aggressive about responding to new socialist regimes that appeared anywhere around the world and was particularly concerned when one of these appeared 90 miles from our shores. Those fleeing Cuba were mostly coming into Florida and a few other states where they moved. The Cuban refugees had a bitter attitude towards the Castro regime and felt that anything possible should be done to overthrow it so they could return and again take control of their commercial and private assets that were seized when they fled. This attitude of the United States government together with the Cuban refugee bitterness led the United States to get involved in an attempt to assist some Cuban refugees in invading Cuba at the Bay of Pigs  in1961, which was an utter failure. The United States then continued with various efforts by the CIA to try and kill or overthrow Castro. None of it worked. It was an excessive response to a fear of communists.

There are some who will defend the United States effort to keep communism and the Soviets away from our back door just off the Florida coast. Indeed, at one time, in 1962 the Soviets we're placing missiles in Cuba and the United States entered into a blockade of Cuba to force the Soviets to withdraw the missiles. The missiles were withdrawn and our relations with Cuba settled into a sequence of sanctions by the United States with periodic efforts by the CIA to stir trouble in Cuba and Cuban efforts to support revolutions in some other countries in South America. The United States never had further threats from Cuba. Our sanctions just remained in place to the detriment of the Cuban economy and the Castro regime supported such socialist causes in Latin America as it chose, which in general failed.

The relations between the two countries then settled into a period where Cuba was ignored, but sanctioned by the United States and the CIA's periodic attempts to intervene in Cuba, such as trying to figure out how to poison Castro's toothpaste, all of which failed.

Presumably in the 65 years since all of this commotion was stirred up we would have been able to settle back into a somewhat normal relationship with our neighbor. That has not happened. The essential reason is that there are a considerable number of Cuban refugees and their offspring living in Florida and they have continued to be adamant about wanting the United States government to be in opposition to Cuba. Because our two major parties, the Republicans and Democrats, are both concerned with trying to win elections in Florida they do not want to make this voting bloc upset. Therefore, each new administration continues the sanctions and opposition to the Cuban government and ourrelations with our neighbor are to ignore it and try and do what we can to ruin its economy. The one exception to this was when President Obama tried to start opening the door to Cuba. That appeared to be somewhat popular in Florida and was having some success when Donald Trump was elected president and ended the policy.

Our policy toward Cuba has been a failure. It defies logic as to why it is still in place except for the voting blocs in Florida. It is even contrary to the logic that we have used with regard to other countries at which we have been at odds. For example, we fought a war in Vietnam for a decade under the banner of needing to stop the spread of communism. It was another failure. Over 50,000Americans died in that war with thousands and thousands of others injured. Vietnam was bombed endlessly. Our bombing campaign over North Vietnam was more concentrated than that over Germany in World War II.. It was a serious and bitter war. Yet today we have diplomatic relations with Vietnam and our trade with that ccommunistcountry now exceeds $150 billion a year including approximately $130 billion of imports from Vietnam to the United States. This was a much more serious confrontation with communism and loss of American blood and assets and yet having entered into a treaty ending the war with Vietnam we have managed to make it one of our major trading partners. Yet with Cuba, with whom we fought no war but just were mad because it had a socialist/communist government. we continue a policy of silly sanctions.

Thoughts

There is no reason to continue our efforts to isolate Cuba. It has relations with the other countries in the Western Hemisphere and participates in the various international bodies such as the United Nations. We had a disagreement with Cuba in the early 1960s.  The basis for the dispute is gone. We have clearly shown that when we are done fighting with a country we can look to see if we have some mutual issues and concepts on which we can agree such as we have done in Vietnam. We can enter intonormal relations with a country in that situation. With Cuba we have resisted normal relations simply because of a voting bloc in the state of Florida. It makes no sense for the United States to be focusing its relations with Cuba based on that voting bloc. It is time to remove the sanctions and enter into normal relations with Cuba.

Silence Dogood

Copies of prior postings of this blog  are available at:  thoughtscm.com

Why are we looking for a conflict to join?

Musings

As the United states has grown to be a world power beginning with World War II we no longer sought to be isolationist but instead felt we should help insure positive results around the world in humanitarian matters and in our efforts to control dictatorships or rogue governments. In general that seems to be a positive position to be taking. However, that also leads the country into a number of situations which it did not anticipate and  questions later start arising such as:  "why did we do this" or "what were we thinking." Oftenthe answer is that there wasn't enough thought that went into our involvement, the government at the time simply had a policy position and intervened.

Vietnam of course is one of those as is Korea and the other conflicts in which we have been involved in the Middle East. Presumably from these involvements we have learned not to insert ourselves unless we have a particular strategic or humanitarian reason and we feel we should be present in that situation. However, we seem to march into most of these situations almost thoughtlessly. In Korea we responded to a communist invasion and then didn't have a strategy going forward, while in Vietnam we decided to support a government that had a dubious claim to be ruling the south part of Vietnam to begin with.  A retrospective look suggests that we entered an escalation with little forethought, We sent military support and then advisors and acted totally surprised when some of the advisors were killed and our ships off the coast of North Vietnam felt they had been attacked. We had inserted ourselves into a civil war and acted like everyone there should know not to touch us.

In the first Gulf War we seem to have made a more thoughtful approach. Kuwait was invaded by Iraq. We made a thoughtful and measured approach and once we had achieved our goal we withdrew. With the second Gulf War we seem to have jumped in for political reasons and have never really emerged. The situation simply expanded into Afghanistan. Syria, Jordan and around the region. Indeed 3 soldiers were killed and  more than 40 others injured in a missile attack on a US base in Jordan in 2024.

The most confusing of our involvements today is our apparent effort to keep ourselves involved in the Israel's conflicts with its neighbors. It is hard to understand why.

Contemplations

We have  now had some level of involvement in Israel fighting its neighbors for over 75 years. In the beginning  this was a policy where we were supporting a David fighting the Goliath of multiple Arab countries that wanted Israel to be wiped off the map. That situation has changed. Now we have Israel taking a pugilistic attitude towards its neighbors and their supporters. Through Israel's diligent efforts it has become the dominant power in the Middle East. It has entered into armistices with several of its neighbors and was at a standstill with theothers. This seemed to bring Israel the general situation that it wanted in that it now controlled the area and there was no  likelihood that it wasto be destroyed  by its various neighbors.However, Israel has continually sought tocontrol the Palestinians that lived within its expanded borders that included Gaza and the West Bank and carry on an intermittent war with Iran and its allies. As this situation has changed there seemed to be little reason to continue being an unquestioning supporter of Israel. It was obviously strong enough to take care of itself and is one of the richer countries in the world on a per capita basis. However American politics have meant that, to seek the favor of a voting bloc in this country that supports Israel,the politicians keep us involved in Israeli affairs. 

Israel's current government's policy is a right wing effort of Israels  to absorb the West Bank and keep Gaza as a colonized or apartheid area. The government is run by Bi Bi Netanyahu who constantly panders to American presidents, talks with them on the phone, acts complacent and then does whatever he wants. Currently what he wants is to keep his war in Gaza and with the allies of Iran going because he is under threat ofhaving to go to jail for some items that have been investigated by the Israeli justice system, and the ongoing war has prevented a new vote from occurring to oust him.  The government of Israel has done nothing to show how Israel could become a country of two peoples, the Hebrews and the Palestinians(the occupants of the land before the modern state of Israel was formed) which is the US's stated goal. The Israel government has no desire to have it be a country of two peoples. Netanyahu seems to think the Palestinians can simply be made to go away. The government's egregious acts towards that minority of its residents show that thegovernment's long term plan is simply to keep sending in more Israeli settlers and pushing out the Palestinians until they have nowhere to go but to be squeezed into the neighboring countries as refugees. 

The trouble with this situation is that the United States government doesn't know how to extract itself from this situation  as Israel's primary supporter in the world. Indeed almost all the  voting blocs at the United Nations and other world organizations and in the European Economic Community have declared their opposition to Israel's policies. Pretty much the United States stands alone in its support of Israel. That suggests we might not have the right policy.

Besides the fact that this is a silly position to be in, what makes it particularly concerning is that the US keeps getting itself deeper into its support of Israel in its conflicts with its neighbors. Besides our consistent annual aid we had a special package of aid that sent Israel $14 billion for weapons in the second-half of this year. Considering that Israel is one of the richest countries in the world that is a confusing position to be in. If Israel is going to have these various fights with its neighbors without any proposal of how to accommodate the Palestinians and bring the conflicts to an end, it does not seem  the United States wants to be inan open-ended position of giving aid to Israel. Sooner or later there's a good prospect  that this policy will get us involved directly in their war.

Most recently we have added a new level of involvement. We have sent a THAAD System to Israel and have sent approximately 100 military people to operate the THAAD system. The THAAD is a state-of-the-art missile defense system. The United States military only has approximately 7 of these. Yet we are placingone of them in Israel instead of having the Israelis come up with their own defense to Iranian and Hezbollah and other missiles. We have now inserted ourselves not only into Israel with our defensive weapons but have sent the soldiers too service and fire those weapons. To the extent Israel and its adversaries start throwing enough missiles at each other, and whatever other levels of fighting go with that,our military individuals are bound to be caught up in the fighting and some number of them injured and killed. When that happens there will undoubtedly be an outcry too retaliate because our soldiers were attacked. That is what happened in Vietnam.

Thoughts

Israel is a wealthy and well armed country. It needs to either find a way to work with its neighbors or  be prepared to defend itself in conflicts with its neighbors. We are 75 years into this effort with no end in site. There is no reason to keep going forward with a blank check of supporting Israel regardless of what it does.  President Biden and President Bush each asked Bi Bi Netanyahu, a number of times, to stand down with the antagonistic efforts and work on ways to bring about a two state solution. Bi Bialways said appropriate things in their conversations about what he would work on and then went and did  whatever his government wanted to do. That has always led to more conflict with the neighbors and guerrilla groupsand such is the continuing status now. It does not make sense to be sending elite missile defense systems, with over 100 soldiers to operate them, into a war that is brewing. We should withdraw the THADD system and the soldiers operating it and tell the Netanyahu government that our support for its efforts are over unless and until it can meet  the standards to create a two state solution that we have requested. The Netanyahu government has ignored us and we are still marching forward in what may well wind up to be the next war. We have no obligation to do that.

Obadiah  Plainman

Copies of all prior postings of this blog can be found at:  thoughtscm.com

Municipal Arenas are $$$ Dilemmas

Musings

It is interesting to contemplate the sports arenas and coliseums that are such a large part of our metropolitan areas. I do not believe there is a lot of published information on such facilities.There is very little I have seen. However, of the information I have read it appears to me that these arenas and coliseums are a product of the 20th century. There were apparently athletic fields in the 1800s and theaters where musicians and singersperformed but not the large municipal  arenas we have today. In the early 1900s it appears that the athletic teams that formed professional leagues played on existing fields that were essentially municipal playgrounds. Occasionally there was a larger building within a city such as New York, Chicago or San Francisco that was used for meetings,  conventions and similar events. As the professional sports teams became more prominent with some prosperity a number of them even built their own stadiums. In some instances there was a municipal stadium of which they were a tenant. So after World War I when Jim Thorpe (probably the greatest athlete in US history) played PeteFats Henry ( football hall of fame) and the Canton Bulldogs hedid so on a field that had no special designation. Similarly whenJim Thorpe played Eddie Roush ( baseball hall of fame) and the Cincinnati Red Stockings they played at Crosley Field  a small baseball facility with stands.

This background  evolved into a pattern where all metropolitan areas of any size want an arena both for professional sports teams and to promote concerts, conventions and conferences in their location. As a dual use facility these arenas had  sportsteam as an additional tenant to help make revenue to cover the expense of the building. However, particularly in more densely populated metropolitan areas we now have a scenario in which the owner of an atletic team regularly approaches the city or country government to have the arena rebuilt for that teams use,or a brand new arena built for the team's use, and the negotiation often includes the owner of the team suggesting that it will move to different city if it does not get the facility which it wants for its sports team.

The demand for new arenas is not necessarily just because the existing arena or stadium is outdated or decrepit. That may be the case, but not always. If we look at the instance of San Diego,it had a perfectly good football stadium but the owner wanted a new fancier stadium similar to the one that had just been constructed in Los Angeles and when San Diego refused to build that new football field the owner of the San Diego Chargers moved his team to Los Angeles to play in the same stadium as the Los Angeles Rams. This was in spite of the fact that the San Diego Chargers had been one of the original teams in the American Football League, had always been very popular in San Diego and was well supported by the population. The city was just not willing to give the owner the edifice that he now wanted to match the team in Los Angeles. This brings us to the question of what is a professional team worth to a municipality.

Contemplations

There are no cities or counties I know of that have the money to build an arena or coliseum out of their annual tax revenue that they receive on an annual basis from collecting taxes. They always use bonds to raise the money, for such projects that may take 20, or often 30, years to be paid off. The city or county may want to do that to have an arena for conferences, conventions, concerts and sports teams. That is a normal consideration in todays world. However, the owner that shows up seeking to have a new arena built is often looking for more than just a place to pay rent and locate a team. Normally the existing or new team also wants some number of tax breaks that come in various packages, such as reduced taxes because the new project will supposedly clean up a brownfield site where it will be located. They also seek any number of other tax reductions and favorable monetary packages, as well as the issuance of the bonds to build the arena or coliseum. The proposal is  that the owner will sign a lease to match the bonds and the rent of the lease will pay the bonds. That would suggest that the municipality breaks even. In general that is not the case. There are usually enough tax breaks and reductions in the package that the city or county is simply losing tax revenue to enhance the attractiveness for the ownerand , hopefully the economy of the community will benefit. 

The owner of the sports team puts all the various incentivestogether based on whatever the teams attorneys and consultants can come up with to maximize the money benefit to the owner. But the city must consider  its obligation to use the tax receipts it receives in a responsible manner. There is usually also a rendition of numbers showing how many jobs the arena will create and the spin-off effect in the community based on some type of economic analysis. However I believe it is safe to say that these packages, when proposed by a team owner, are pretty well guaranteed to ensure that the team owner will do well and it is the municipality that is at risk if the benefits  provided costmore than the added tax revenue that  will be collected. If the projections, which are usually generously conceived by the owner, are not met it is to the detriment of the community.

This seems like an odd situation. The owners of the professional teams are constantly trying to get the people in their location to support the team and identify with the team because the team is in their community and is for them. The owner makes money by gaining their loyalty and drawing them into the arena or stadium. However, when there is a better proposed package elsewhere, or the city is not willing to do the upgrades and revisions that the owner feels should occur, the owner is free to leave for another community. The owner's loyalty to the citydisappears in a flash. We have seen a number of these occurrences in locations such as Cleveland, Baltimore, Oakland, Kansas City, Saint Louis, Phoenix and Montreal. 

It is not likely that anything is going to change the sequence of communities wanting large and attractive arenas or coliseums and team owners seeking the best package they can negotiate to put money in their pocket.  However it does seem that the municipalities should develop a better withdrawal provision in their contracts for such facilities which require an owner leaving to compensate the city in a stated  dollar amount, which increases over time, for the withdrawal. The owner is always happy to request a number of favorable provisions from the municipality but the owner will undoubtedly be hesitant to give anything back in return. However, prudence suggests that the city or county should do something to protect themselves. This concept is not unusual. Even in the NCAA the conferences have withdrawal provisions if a team is leaving for another conference. Those fees are now in the tens of millions of dollars. If a college sees something it thinks is  better in anotherconference where it can earn more money for its athletic program it now has to pay to move, particularly if it is a division one school. Florida State University is facing that dilemma right now as it wants to get out of the Atlantic Coast Conference but there is a huge withdrawal cost to do that.

We should not expect the owners of teams to become less inventive or less demanding for the things they want. They're simply trying to better their position as best they can. Salt Lake City now has that dilemma with the owner of their professional basketball team who has purchased a hockey team that was in Phoenix and is moving it to Salt Lake City. However he also now wants new facilities to play in for his teams and has proposed the restructuring of downtown in order to accommodate his goals. The proposal has even suggested that a highly regarded concert hall in the downtown should be demolished to make room for the athletic facility. It is mind boggling that someone could come up with such a proposal.

Another idea which makes great sense to me, but it's not likely to be accepted by  owners, is that when a team asks for a new facility either in the municipality where it is already located or from a new city which is soliciting the move, that city should demand a provision that the team cannot leave the new facility for another location unless it pays a withdrawal fee and the municipality approves of the move in some manner, either by its legislative body or by a vote of its citizens. In essence if these teams want a lot of beneficial tax breaks and bond issuances from a municipality the municipality should get a hook into the team which compels it to stay associated with the municipality.

Thoughts

In the post World War II era owners of professional teams and entertainers and their concert companies have moved to a new concept of facilities. Entertainers no longer perform in the local theaters in small and large towns and evening lounges but go on tour in large coliseums and arenas. Sports teams no longer build their own facilities and are identified with one town or another. They are simply entities owned by people for whom they are mostly just an expensive toy and the owners have figured out how to make a significant amount of money off of the operation of the toy. The facilities in smaller towns do not  perform that way but those in the larger communities  do. Those communities should think twice about what benefits they offer to obtain or keep a professional team. The negotiation equation for these agreements needs to be more balanced, so they are fair to the fans who are also tax paying citizens.

Obadiah Plainman

Copies of prior postings of this blog are available at: thoughtscm.com

Disaster Responses, Inadequate Foresight

Musings

Hurricane Helene swept  ashore this week  causing considerable damage and over 200 deaths in the southeastern states of Florida, Georgia, Tennessee, North Carolina, South Carolina and Virginia. Much of the damage is inland from the coast which is somewhat different from what we usually think of with hurricanes. We normally anticipate that the hurricane wind and rain and the push of ocean water onto the coast will damage the coast the most and dissipate as it moves inland. Helene did cause a lot of damage on the coast but its winds and large amounts of rain also created a great deal of flooding and damage inland.  

The damage seemed to be particularly unusual even for a stronghurricane. Certainly over 200 deaths is not our norm for such storms. Perhaps some amount of this is caused by the changing climate and stronger storms which last longer. However, a great deal of the damage is also a failure of the local political entities who failed to follow best practices with building requirements and anticipation of response to natural disasters. We can study storms and perhaps predict a degree of their changing nature but clearly the governmental failure to provide necessary regulations and marshalling of response efforts can be corrected if there is  political willpower.

Contemplations

With this storm we have seen an excessive amount of damage due to the construction of homes and communities where they don't belong. This is the result of communities failing to have the restrictions and building permit requirements that are necessary to minimize damage from  storms. On the coast everyone wants to be right on the coast and as close as possible to the water. If you're on a hillside or a mountain everyone wants to be where they can get a good view and perhaps even buildinto the side of the hill or mountain so that they can have an extraordinary setting. All of those locations, where everyone wants to be, are the worst places to be building. They are most prone to damage from storms. Further if you build there you certainly need a significant amount of additional structural protections if you are not going to have your house, business or infrastructure ruined or swept away.

A significant part of Helene's damage can be attributed to laxbuilding permit enforcement as some states such as North Carolina had not even adopted the recommended structural requirements for homes.  Further, the areas in river valleys and on hillsides are of greater risk from storms or earthquakes. They need to have more building reinforcement and setbacks than other parts of the community. Of course, that increases the price of the structure. No one wants that. Further, few people anticipate the fact that they may be damaged in a natural disaster. That is why the governmental regulation is there. The government is supposed to have studied these issues and knows what is recommended in the building codes and can enforce those codes.

The contrary  position is the developers and building companies who want to bring in their building at the lowest possible price to enhance it's sales value.  Extra reinforcement may protect the property but the builder knows it will make it harder to sell. Therefore, they lobby for any number of exceptions, or at the state legislature to have the state legislature refuse to adopt the recommendations of the national organization which reviews and revises the recommended building codes  There are strong lobbying efforts by the developer organizations not to implement them. The failure to pass those codes seems to be pure negligence. However, legislative entities are not liable for negligence, but they can be voted out of office. The trouble isthat people rarely think about this issue when they are voting as they get caught up in all sorts of political silliness instead of serious policy discussions. There is nothing very sexy abouttrying to get elected based on building policy. The electorate trusts those in office to act appropriately in setting policy as opposed to responding to lobbyists. Unfortunately, that is often not the case.

Anyone who has been part of a local government knows that stormwater runoff is a constant concern. If not properly anticipated, it will fill the low spots on the ground and from there start flooding outwards. Therefore, you should not be building in those low spots and you should provide large areas such as wetlands to try and absorb the runoff water so it doesn't start to form an over loaded river rushing downhill. It is amazing how many plots of property have been constructed with people living or  working in valleys next to waterways and  everyone is surprised when  flooding happens.

The potential for windstorms, rain and ocean storm surge are known. A great deal of the damage can be anticipated, Butpoliticians are busy getting elected and not worried about a storm that might be years away. One of the best examples was Hurricane Katrina which hit New Orleans. All the officials there protested that no one could have predicted such a large hurricane hitting the city and therefore they weren't to blame. However, hurricane Ivan of almost the same size had passed through just a month earlier on a course just to the east of the city. Further the possibility of a hurricane causing havoc in the city have been predicted for years. Yet the politicians were  sure that they should not have been on notice of that fact. The elected officials have to be called to task.

In anticipating  natural disasters the final step the politicians have to work on and improve is their response system and how they are going to marshal the assets for a disaster. It is not possible to have the response vehicles and supplies stored everywhere. However, they need to be preset at appropriate locations which presumably is already anticipated but then thetiming and methods by which they will be moved to the affected area must be thought through in the planning of routes and construction of a community. If the only road to get to a locationis on a hillside and it is wiped out the community is not likely to have enough helicopters to provide sufficient response. The same is true of bridges. They must be reinforced to avoid being knocked down. If constructed just to allow some cars to drive across does not  mean that they are sufficiently built to withstand a storm. Think ahead, don't just approve a proposal which is presented until  all of the issues that might evolve to affect the community are considered.

Finally, fund the necessary work.  Every state in the country appears to have a serious deficiency in funding repairs to infrastructure.   After every disaster FEMA, the federal disaster agency, announces it is short of funds. Most recently after Helene the Republican speaker of the House of RepresentativesPaul Johnson announced that for the time being FEMA had enough money to address the problems from Helene and future action to fund that entity by the House could wait. However, this week we have another hurricane headed to Florida and it's expected to land there before the week is out. It does seem that Mister Johnson should anticipate issues a little farther into the future.

Thoughts

The damage that occurred in Helene could not have been avoided but the extent of the damage could have been had the various legislatures and county and local commissions been adopting the best practices for their building regulations and then enforcing them. Failure to do that leads to problems In Florida the collapse of a high rise residential condominiumoccurred after the building inspectors found problems with the high rise but did not enforce the necessary corrections. No one likes  to have government  regulations but without the regulation and enforcement the community is at risk.

Silence Dogood

Copies of all prior postings of this blog are available at  thoughtscm.com

Goodbye to the Isreal for Whom I Rooted and Supported

Musings 

It seems to me that the country of Israel for whom I rooted and supported over many decades since its independence in 1948 no longer exists. I have not made any comments about Israel for a number of weeks as I have been  baffled by my own feelings and Israel's actions. I used to be a strong supporter of Israel as I learned the story of how it was founded and it's struggles to establish itself. I understood that this process included pushing aside a number of Palestinians and establishing the country in the Middle East for the Jewish people. But their experiences with the Nazis and  other fascist regimes together with the East European pogroms seemed to call for a country where these people could gather and live peacefully with their neighbors. There then followed a number of wars with the surrounding Arab countries where  Israel prevailed. All of that made for a great David and Goliath story and I was an avid follower and supporter However now Isreal seems to have turned into a bully. I no longer feel that way.

Contemplations

The establishment of Israel included excesses by the Jewish people moving there and by the Palestinians that wanted to keep them out. There were also such terrorist actions such asMenachem Begin's group that blew up the King David Hotel. Today we would be appalled at that as a gross action by a terrorist organization treading on the lives of innocent people. However, in the turmoil of Israel's creation and the lack of clear action and fair treatment by the British who ruled the country most of those things were easy to overlook.

Israel then consistently built a strong military and became the leading power in the Middle East fighting off multiple Arab nations in its various wars, the six day war, the yom kipper war,etcetera. It was easy to support Israel in these actions as it seemed to be a small country which it's various neighbors weretrying to overwhelm. Of course the neighbors were upset that the Palestinians that had lived there, when the Jewish people emigrated. were cast aside and wound up in camps with no future offered to them. The Israeli answer seemed to be that they should just move to an Arab country  and settle. Many of them did move to Jordan and some other locations. However that still left many Palestinians uprooted from their homes in the refugee camps.

There was always a discussion going, at least in Western countries, that this should result in two countries or a dual country where the Jewish people and Palestinians could live next door to each other. However, the Israeli government was not interested in taking care of refugees camps and the Arab countries seemed to offer only minimal aid to those places. Thusthe unsatisfactory situation continued. This led to periodic wars as the Arab countries sought to reestablish Arabs in various parts of  Israel. Among these was the six day war  in which Israel seized control of the area west of the Jordan river which became referred to as the West Bank. This area was populated almost entirely by Palestinian peoples although it had constituted a part of ancient Israel from biblical days. The Israeli government saw its opportunity to expand and immediately began establishing Jewish settlements in the West Bank as well as in the Gaza Strip.

At a successive date, after a number of Palestinian riots and uprisings, Israel abandoned the Gaza Strip and left it to the Palestinian peoples but kept control of the Strip's finances and police structure.

In the West Bank the Israeli government began establishing multiple settlements which grew to considerable size. I believe there are now in excess of 160 Jewish settlements in the West Bank which together total something over 700,000 people.These Jewish settlements are intermixed amongst a Palestinian population of something over 2,700,000 people. The area iscontrolled by the Israeli military and police and the roads to Jewish settlements are  connected to Israel and the other Israeli settlements and the Palestinians are not allowed to use those roads. In essence the Palestinian part of the West Bank is chopped up into many small areas which are regulated and controlled by the Israelis. Although the Israeli military withdrew from Gaza and supposedly left it under the control of the Palestinian government it was still dominated by the Israeli government which controlled all of the finances and police structure.

The West Bank was chopped up into many small areas with Jewish settlements going into the West Bank under the guise of the need for security. Although that was the alleged reason it appears that it was then and always has been a way to populate the areas of Judea and Samaria, ancient areas of Israel in biblical time, with Jewish settlers in place of the Palestinians.  In essence the war provided the Israeli government with the means to draw those two areas of the West Bank into the country of Israel and itbegan expelling the Palestinians and allowing the settlement of Jewish sellers.

The war in Gaza has been well publicized. It began with the  terrorist organization of Hamas raiding a Jewish kibbutz and killing or seizing approximately 1500 people. The response of the Netanyahu government has been to slaughter the Palestinians living in Gaza. They have been constantly bombing and shelling the area back and forth destroying schools, hospitals, residences and anything else they encountered. If the Israeli government has to kill any number of the two and a half million Palestinians that did live there they are not concerned. They are now killing Palestinians at the rate in excess of 40 to one to the numbers of Israelis that were lost in the Hamas raid. It is a totally inhumaneaction in an area which had an apartheid structure run by Israel to start with. The Israeli government does not care. They are willing to destroy the functioning of that area and the people that live there can either try to rebuild or move elsewhere. TheIsraelis have offered no plan for the future of Gaza.

The West Bank is an even more debilitating story. Although the people there are not being slaughtered in mass by a bombing and shelling campaign, they are being consciously expelled from their villages and homes by the Israeli government and settlers on the West Bank. The settlers  move in, take over an area, chase the Palestinians off and establish a new settlement. In agricultural areas they take this action by a group of settlers showing up, poisoning the Palestinians wells and killing all oftheir livestock to warn them to move away so that the settlers can move in. The settlers are armed and the Palestinians have very few things with which to protect themselves. The Israeli military is located in the area but does very little to protect the Palestinians. They essentially take care of the settlers.

The actions  to the present show a continual seizing of Palestinian territory and the forcing out of more and more Palestinians from their land. There is nothing legal or justified in these actions. it is pure seizure without compensation or justification. It is as blatant as the division of Poland by Russia,Germany and Austria in the 1700s. The monarchs of those threecountries simply wanted portions of their neighbor Poland and so they decided to divide Poland amongst themselves and inthree coordinated actions seized land. They took the entire country of Poland and wiped it off the map. That seems to be exactly what Israel is now in the process of trying to do with Palestine. Bi bi Netanyahu is the new monarch who is busy playing the game of defending Israel while he was really conquering his neighbors and putting them in a state of apartheid. The Western countries have protested constantly but none of them have taken any action to stop Israel from swallowing the rest of Palestine to put it in the country of Israel or leave it as an apartheid area that Israel controls.

Thoughts

The Western countries and particularly the United States could take action to stop this if they wanted to. However the Jewish vote and monetary contributions for causes is strong in the United States and influential in much of Western Europe and none of these countries have taken the steps to withhold aid,refuse to sell weapons or impose sanctions on Israel that would let it know it's isolated in the world and has to revert back to being Israel with  the Palestinians as neighbors. There is much talk about a two country solution but no one is taking any steps to force the Netanyahu government to begin its implementation. Indeed Bibi Netanyahu seems to understand that the longer he can keep this conflict going the more likely he is to stay in control of the Israeli government and that  is his a primary motive in his actions. It is a sad state. It is unclear to me how it will turn out, although I believe it will have a sad ending for Israel sometime in the future. Regardless, I can no longer be a supporter of the actions of the Israeli government.

Obadiah Plainman

Previously posted editions of this blog can be found at:  thoughtscm.com

The White House Climate Policy Going Backwards Again

Musings

I recently saw some information about the Biden administration's reaction to the European Union's proposed new rules on supply chains for  products derived from forested areas.The EU has been working on a new set of rules for over five years to identify the supply chains that originate from forest locations to provide  products to various companies that produce the end products that are sold in the EU. In effect they are requiring companies to trace their supply chains to ensure that their products did not derive from sites created by deforesting the environment and then shipping  products  to become endproducts in the European Union. The purpose is to reduce deforestation in places such as South America, Central America, East Asia, tropical Africa and other places with large areas of forest that are often cut or burned down to either provide wood products or to do farming or grazing of animals. The net effect of this reduces the forest canopies and has a negative effect on the climate. The EU's set of rules is  an attempt to try and reduce climate warming by making the  companies that provide the endproduct to consumers police their own supply chain to eliminate products created from deforested land and, if the products are found to violate the supply chain rules, there are significance penalties for the companies offering that product for sale.

In typical fashion there has been a strong lobbying reaction to oppose this effort or at least delay its implementation. Some of the various companies that will be affected are lobbying their respective governments and then the governments are lobbying the EU to try and delay the implementation of this set of rules.The Biden administration is one of the governments that has joined the lobbying effort to delay the implementation.

Contemplations

Whenever new statutes, rules, and regulations are imposed  some number of companies that will be affected  always protest that they will be detrimentally affected, it will hurt the economy and their employees and their communities. These same types of complaints were made when mileage requirements were established for car manufacturers. There was a howl of howawful the result would be. This seems to be the usual type of lobbying and complaints made by companies that mass produce products for consumer consumption. The problem is that these companies usually have strong lobbying efforts and good ties into their governments and they are often able to have  exceptions made so that they don't have to meet the regulations.The result is that the effort intended , in this instance to reduce climate change, is sidetracked and often has trouble getting back into play.

The EU rules are meant to reduce the destruction of tropical forests and  temperate woodlands which are then converted into 7 basic commodities: cattle, cocoa, coffee, palm oil, rubber, soybeans and wood which are then cultivated on the newly cleared land. The United States paper companies suggested that this would cause a shortage of diapers and sanitary pads in Europe! I presume their opposition was more profound but in essence it is clear some companiesbegan a strong lobbying effort to oppose the rules and the Biden administration  joined in. The confusing and disappointing fact is that the Biden administration did join in the lobbying effort to  delay the rules. Supposedly the Biden administration is  strongon environmental issues and wants to implement rules to delay or stop climate change. This would seem to be right up its alley. However, it is an election year and the Biden administration has once again shown that it knows how to support a policy fromone side of its mouth but take a contrary position from the other side of its mouth, always with some nice statement about how it's important for some reason or other and it's only a delay for a period of time. That is the position of all of the companies and countries that oppose the EU's new rules. It is a egregious position. 

The EU began taking comments on these proposals in 2020. The new law was approved in 2023 after review efforts by the EU's governing body. All of the protesting companies  had clear notice that this issue was coming up and the actions of the supply chains of these companies were on the table. Yet they delayed taking action because that would have cut into their profits. Instead they simply continued operating as before or with only few changes and trusted their lobbying efforts to delay the implementation of the rules to be imposed at the end of this year after much advance notice. Yet, the Biden administration still jumps in to encourage the EU to delay. That is incomprehensible. It would be nice if our politicians actions would follow their statements of support for a policy but obviously this is a disease which seems to affect all  political entities.

There are a number of large companies that determined tofollow the  new regulation and created the information to track their supply chains and a number of countries that have set up a system to track the production of the produce from their forested regions to ensure that the deforestation does not occur. For example, Ghana has managed to set up a system to track itsforest to ensure that it is not deforested for the production of cocoa. If Ghana can set up a system to handle this issue and various  companies have managed to set up  systems that track their supply chain, the United states should not be lobbying the EU that this is too arduous for some United States companies. Once again it seems that our political response ignores our stated policies.

Thoughts 

To me this is a no brainer. The Biden administration and the United States policy is supposed to be busy trying to support efforts to reduce climate change. The EU's efforts to do this in forested areas and reduce  deforestation has been underway for a number of years. There's absolutely no reason to be lobbying the EU to reduce its very positive set of new rules on supply chains from forest products.

Silence Dogood

Copies of all prior postings of this blog may found at: thoughtscm.com

Lax Regulation and Citizen Opposition

Musings

It seems to be a common event nowadays for citizens in a community to oppose new projects that are proposed or approved. There will always be a group of people opposed to anything new and any change. Its confusing because our communities spend a lot of time and money to attract newprojects. However, I believe there is an  intuitively held reason why there are so many people opposing new projects today. These projects always have a certain amount of complications to them and the developers and owners of the company involved always promise to follow all of the rules and requirements that are imposed on them and to be good citizens. They present nice architectural drawings that show wonderful locations without  hardly any traffic and nicely landscaped. The approving authority be it local, state or federal government almost always has a whole list of requirements that must be completed and regularly followed up on in order to receive the approval. However, once the approval is in the compliance with all of the rules and regulations that are imposed on the development seems to fall apart. The regulatory enforcement is regularly lacking. The citizens have learned this and therefore they are skeptical of any approval of a new project.

Contemplations

It is easy to follow this scenario of approval, lack of compliance, lack of oversight by the regulators, failure to correct violations even when identified by the regulators, and in some number of instances accidents or destructive events caused by the lack of compliance.

Just a few of these sequences demonstrate the failure of the regulatory systems. Enbridge Energy had a pipeline that burst and caused  the largest inland spell in the United States at over 800,000 gallons that went into the Kalamazoo river system. Not only did the pipeline break but the employees that were supposed to be monitoring it were very slow to catch the break and react. All of the supposed safety requirements that Enbridge had put in place either failed or were not kept in place and regularly followed.  Enbridge is currently engaged in a multi year effort to have another major pipeline approved in the United States to transport Canadian oil and they promise many safety measures.

In Florida we had the collapse of the 12 story beachfront condominium in Surfside causing the deaths of 98 people. The property had a number of building violations some of which had been identified. Required corrections had not been performed because the condominium owners had opposed the cost of the reforms which were structural and expensive. The end result was the collapse of the building and the 98 deaths. The government which had identified some of the violations had not followed up on compelling corrections due to the controversy of the cost and owner opposition. Florida is full of similar projects of which I presume many have similar defects.

We now have an outbreak of listeria at a Boars Head plant in Virginia that has apparently killed approximately 9 people andleft dozens of others sick from contaminated product produced there. The inspection showed a number of violations of safety codes for over 2 years that have been ongoing and we're not corrected. Boars Head has closed the plant and is now sterilizing it. The Department of Agriculture had not compelled compliance. Reports were filed and communications exchanged, small consolation.

These occurrences reflect the many instances of involvement between our commercial world and the  residential world which require the government to carefully scrutinize a project, to approve all of the necessary constraints and restrictions and then follow up with inspections and enforcement. There usually are enough constraints and restrictions in the approval process. Indeed the developers will say there are  too many regulations and regulators and they are unnecessary. However there is rarely a requirement for the project to produce an annual fee to provide for regular inspections and enforcement. That is considered to bea job for the government, who is always there and has enough money to inspect and enforce. However, as we know the government usually  does not have enough money in its budgetfor compliance or decides that the regulatory enforcement budget is not that important and under funds it. Many, I would say most, projects in the country are not regularly inspected with prompt enforcement to follow an inspection. The only reason there are not more accidents and catastrophes is that most of the companies do follow the necessary requirements.

Unfortunately we have learned that without inspections and enforcement there is a regular number of companies that either try to skip the  regulatory requirement in order to  leave that work for a later day or don't want to spend the money to comply.The capitalistic striving for higher profits is undoubtedly one of the causes of this type of problem. That being an inevitability it is incumbent upon the regulatory authority to be consistently involved in the enforcement process. Unfortunately, there is nothing sexy or enticing about this

aspect of government and hence the politicians when they run for office and get into office don't spend too much time reviewing this aspect of their government as they prefer things that will put them in the news and perhaps draw money to run for office and votes in the next election. That is a sad commentary but that is also the way capitalistic democracies function.

Because of this incongruity many proposed projects that appear to be good for the community in terms of jobs, tax revenues and growth are opposed  because the citizens don't feel they can trust the politicians and regulators to make sure that the project evolves the way it is presented to the community in the approval process.

Two current proposed projects in Michigan demonstrate this dichotomy A major battery manufacturing project close to Big Rapids, Michigan has created a lot of consternation in that  community as some number of the people there do not trust what the project will evolve into and how it will be controlled by the regulatory authorities. Similarly a project in the vicinity of Marshall, Michigan for an extensive battery plant and manufacturing facility has created a lot of opposition in spite of the fact that it would seem to be just what the government is trying to attract with new manufacturing jobs and up-to-date technology. Many of the people there don't trust the government to keep the project under control and regulated so that it is anasset to the community and not a large project which creates undesirable industrial sprawl.

Thoughts

We need new projects like that proposed for Big Rapids and Marshall to feed our economy and continue to allow us tomaintain our economic strength. The trouble is the government has failed our communities  as it does not perform its obligations to do the inspections and the regulatory follow up and enforcement that is required. These are not the matters that politicians care about. They are quick to show up at the news coverage once the problem occurs and be sure that their pictureand their comments are in the coverage but they spend little time addressing these issues in the day-to-day operations of passing their laws and ensuring their enforcement. They also do not allocate sufficient funds to ensure that administration bureaucracy that they oversee can perform efficiently. Of course they underfund the bureaucracy because funding the bureaucracy does not draw votes and everyone is happy to complain about too much government and regulation or that the bureaucracy needs to be shrunk and its efforts undercut. That is a regular commentary but it is false. I believe that is exactlybackwards as the administrative bureaucracy is the part of government that actually functions and does things. We should enhance the regulatory activities and reduce the politicians.  We need to discourage this incongruity and improve the functioning of the regulatory part of our government.

Obadiah plainman

previously posted editions of this blog can be found at:   thoughtscm.com

World War II’s Atomic Bombs

Musings

I recently saw some comments about the atomic bombs dropped in World War II. I believe those comments lacked some depth and review of the entire picture with regard to the bombs. The bombs were the only nuclear ones that have ever been used in warfare. They caused massive destruction and death and that of course has led to much commentary. However it seems to me that the commentaries and reviews  focus on: if they should have been dropped, why they were dropped and particularly how many people were killed and injured by the bombs. There is no doubt that the bombs were the most destructive force that mankind has ever used or experienced and all of the consternation about the fact that they were used is perhaps appropriate. However, as I understand the situation there is much more that everyone should keep in mind as they think about what occurred in those last days of World War II.

Contemplations

The setting for the dropping of the bombs on the two Japanese cities is the end of an extensive and cruelly fought war that began in 1932 with Japan attacking China, then escalated the war with China in 1937, and then attacking the United States and the various European colonial countries in Asia in 1941. In fighting those wars the Japanese demonstrated little or nopropriety or fairness to either their enemies, captives or civilians. Japan executed nurses, medical doctors  and othercivilians who were living or working in the areas they seized.The first act of Japanese officers that were sent to fight in China was to take a  Chinese prisoner and chop off his head. This wasa brutal war Japan initiated. The allied armies began to respond in kind to Japanese soldiers. There was little quarter given and little expected. However, by 1945 the writing was on the wall.The United States Navy and Marine Corps had driven across the Pacific and seized islands up to and including those the Japanese considered part of their country such as the Marianas, Ryukyusthe and Bornins. In those locations United States  began to build airfields for its air forces to bomb Japan and support the invasion of Japan.

Once the United States Navy and Marine Corps captured the Marianas  the American bombers were in range of Japan using B29 bombers. The Army Air Force bombers were consistentlydropping bombs on  various locations in Japan. However these planes flew quite high, that made their aim poor and they really caused  little damage. After analyzing these results the Army Air Force decided to change tactics. They began bombing Japanese cities with incendiary bombs. The logic was simple. The Japanese cities had many buildings that were made of wood and paper. By using incendiary bombs they could start fires that would spread and burn down most, if not all, of the city. This was similar to the firestorms that were created in Hamburg and Dresden in Germany by the British bombing campaign. The Americans made-up a list of Japanese cities by size and importance and began bombing them. At the time of the Japanese surrender they had destroyed most if not all of 64 cities with the fire bombings. There were plenty of these bombs left to continue that effort. The Air Force thought this destructionwould cause Japan to surrender. But it didn't. I believe the statistics show that the fire bombing of Tokyo killed more people than both of the atomic bombs put together.

After capturing the Marianas islands the United States Navy went on to capture the Bonin islands and the Ryukyu islands (Okinawa ). This created staging bases to attack Japan from a very close range. At the same time the Navy sent extremely large fleets with dozens of large air carriers bringing over 1000 planes at a time and its battleships to the Japanese coast where they bombed and shelled whatever targets of opportunity they could find. This was a constant slugging that was going on and the Japanese had very little response except to send kamikaze planes once in a while and hope they hit something. 

The Navy also sent a more deadly force to blockade and destroy the Japanese fighting ability. This was the Navy's submarine campaign. As they crossed the Pacific the Navy moved their submarine bases closer and closer to Japan and they now sent dozens of submarines to cover all of the coasts of Japan and sink any ship that was trying to come in or leave the country. In essence the Japanese could not get supplies in or out. This was particularly devastating as Japan did not produce enough food for its  population nor have enough raw materials for its war industry to build new weapons and ammunition. The food ration for the Japanese people was cut time and again. There wassimply not enough food to go around. The submarines finally reached a point where they were sinking wooden junks with torpedoes because there were no other targets.

So we now have a situation where the Japanese were having their cities fire bombed and destroyed, their coasts were being bombed and shelled  and they could get  no food in or supplies to feed their people or make any of the instruments of war. They were being burned to death, starved to death and blown up. In response the only weapon they seem to have was to take barely trained young men and put them in old airplanes and asked them to go try and crash into an American ship. They also tried to train their population to fight the Americans if they landed by giving the population wooden sticks to use for weapons.

Some of the commentators have argued that if the results of the bombs had been sufficiently disclosed to the Japanese they would have surrendered. There is no evidence of that. After the first bomb was dropped the Japanese made no effort to respond to the Americans call for surrender. After the second bomb was dropped the governing cabinet still did not surrender. The emperor interceded and told them to surrender. However, there were still units of Japanese soldiers that opposed the surrender and tried to stage a coup of the government and seize the announcement of surrender after the second bomb was dropped.This attitude of no surrender had not only remained after both bombs but on the date the second bomb was dropped, August 9th, the Soviet Union declared war on Japan and invaded Manchuria, overwhelming the Japanese army there. The diehards in Japan we're still unconvinced. Through an extensive effort the surrender announcement for the radio was delivered and broadcast and undercut the effort of the recalcitrant soldiers.

Thoughts

At the time of the dropping of the bombs the Japanese people were being burned to death, starved to death and bombarded and shelled to death. The two bombs can be debated forever but what's clear is that the decision to drop them did get the surrender to occur and ended the bloodshed. That was a thankful day for the American troops that could quit fighting, the Japanese people that now had a chance to live instead of being slaughtered by this massive attack and devastation of their country, and the Japanese members of the military could also survive. In many oral histories of   young Japanese they stated that they were thankful for the surrender because otherwise they knew that they were heading to their death. There are manypeople that the bombs can be said to have saved their life as opposed to just looking at the destruction and deaths.  We should acknowledge that the bombs ended a dreadful war.

Obadiah Plainman

Copies of all of these blogs are available at:  thoughtscm.com

Restating History and the Philip Schuyler Saga

Musings

I was recently thinking about Philip Schuyler and the saga of his memory and monument. He was a Revolutionary War general and the owner of a number of large parcels of property in upstate New York. He  played a particularly large role in the war from it's beginning when he joined the patriots and oversaw their invasion of Canada in 1775 on through the defeat of the British Army of General Burgoyne at Saratoga in upstate New York in 1777. That campaign and the surrender of the British Army was the turning point in the war as it was almost unheard of for the British  to have an entire army surrender and be captured, let alone by a bunch of rabble rousing rebels in the colonies.  Following that victory France and other European countries joined the colonial effort to end the British rule in the 13 colonies. Philip Schuyler was the general in charge of the tactical and strategic planning to oppose General Burgoyne and he produced a very successful campaign.

General Burgoyne began his descent upon the colonies from Quebec in May 1777 but because of all of the intrusions by the various groups of patriots organized by General Schuyler he was not able to reach the area north of Albany until September almost five months later. That was late in the campaigning season and the British became very disillusioned about their campaign and whether they would be able to obtain enough supplies from the countryside to subsist in the fall and through the winter. The British were forced to attack a superior American position and were defeated. In recognition of General Schuyler's efforts both in this campaign and otherwise in the revolution and his political actions in Albany as a leader of the state government he was lauded and various locations were named after him and statutes erected. Most recently his statue was removed from the state capitol because he had been a slave owner.. I do not believe that is a simple issue.

Contemplations

I do not have much information on Philip Schuyler as a slave owner. Most of the writings I looked at simply noted that he owned slaves that worked on his farms in New York. However, his story as a leader of the revolution is fairly clear. He was a rich landowner in the state and when the revolution began he was made a general of the militia in New York and  served in that capacity in the revolutionary army. He planned the invasion into Canada in that first year of the war and remained the general in charge of the patriot forces in New York in the succeeding years. The British efforts in 1775 and 1776 to defeat the patriots in Massachusetts and the New England colonies were not successful. In response the British formed a new army under the command of General Burgoyne. His army was sent to and gathered in Quebec, marched up the Saint Lawrence river to Montreal and then turned south on a route following Lake Champlain and Lake George to connect to the Hudson River to then proceed to Albany and from there to join with the British forces in the city of New York to split the colonies in two. Burgoyne's force was approaching 10,000 men and appeared to be unstoppable as there was no organized defense at Lake Champlain, Lake George or in the northern part of the Hudson River. Schuyler employed a delaying defense of felling trees and blocking passageways to make Burgoyne's march difficult. It was successful. The British stores and supplies ran short and they began sending units off to try and gather up supplies from the neighboring area. Most of these forces were  defeated, most notably by John Starks men at Bennington, Vermont. This caused great consternation in the main army as they were in the area north of Albany at Saratoga and confronted by a set of fortifications that had been established by Thaddeus Kosciuszko. He was a military officer from the Polish army that had training as an engineer and proved to be the patriots primary engineering officer throughout the revolution. Based on his fortifications the British advance was stymied.

At about this time the Continental Congress intervened to send a new general, Horatio Gates, to be in charge of the army at Saratoga, a decision which made little sense and proved to be a serious mistake.(a common political result).  Horatio's actions as the new general in charge of the patriots at Saratoga almost  caused the rebel army to be defeated but it did prevail in capturing the British Army. Gates subsequent actions in the war demonstrated his incompetence,  He was put in command of the patriot army in the South. It was attacked by a British Army.  Gates got on his horse and rode 60 miles in the other direction leaving his army to be captured and killed. The actions of Phillip Schuyler, John Stark, Thaddeus Kosciusko and Benedict Arnold were extolled in the defeat of British at Saratoga, Gates offered little of value to the campaign.

Because of Philip Schuyler's actions in attaining the victory  he was recognized, monuments built and places were named after him. In recent years there has been a scrutiny of  people that owned slaves in our history, in this case the 1700s and early 1800s. There is no doubt Philip Schuyler owned slaves or that slave owners were common at that point of time. It is even appropriate to note that Philip Schuyler was a slave owner in the locations where his history and contributions occurred. The difficulty is the effort to erase him because he was a slave owner.

If we are going to take this approach we wind up erasing George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, James Monroe, Patrick Henry, all of the Lees from Virginia, the Laurens from South Carolina, and many other leaders of the formation of our country. It further is inappropriate to say that people who made great contributions, even if they owned slaves get a pass. I don't believe that is a proper deviation of what in the 1770's the people then thought was meritorious. It would seem to me that rather than removing  statues and erasing  indications of their existence there should be some additional information put in place to note they were slave owners, when and how slavery was abolished and that we should all remember that part of our history.

Also, please note, Schuyler's statue does not correlate to the confederate statue’s glorifying the civil war rebellion of the South. Philip Schuyler helped create our country, his was not attempting to destroy it.

Thoughts

Philip Schuyler should have his statue put back in a public place with some sort of explanation as an adjunct stating his position as a slave owner and when and how the state of New York finally abolished slavery. That would be much more informative than simply hiding a statue of a person that performed a great service during the Revolutionary War and pretending none of that ever happened. We need to start stating our history the way it happened and studying it so it is clear to us what it is and what it was and to be sure we don't allow such an autocracy again.

Obadiah Plainman

Copies of all previous copies of this blog are at:   thoughtscm.com

Slow Down Parents

Musings

This is a very busy political time with the Democratic convention underway and the Republicans and Democrats scouring the country to look for anyone who will cheer for them and promise to vote for them. However in the midst of all of this hoopla we should take note that we have another very importantevent occurring with coverage across  the nation;  all day long,every day, professional announcers and crowds cheering every occurrence.:  Its the Little League World Series!! In case you missed it, it is occuring in Pennsylvania which as you know is a battleground state. However, while we watch intently on TV to see the best 11 and12 year olds play baseball with each other we should take some time to think about the activities that exist for our youth and the direction in which they are developing. I am not sure we should be happy with that evolution. Kids sports seem to be headed out of control.

Contemplations

The term helicopter parents has been around for a number of years and it seems a normal parental status for many parents  who are busy  overseeing their children's activities and development on an extensive scale. Parenting has certainly evolved  in the last 50 years as families got smaller, there aremore families with additional funds to enhance youth activities and the development of many of the modern devices and gizmos have allowed parents to stay right on top of their children's activities. This has been questioned any number of times by people who point out that the children need to be given some freedom so that they can experience success and failure and learn to handle events in the world..  Imagine, kids previouslywalked to school playgrounds and organized their own games !This progression has come to my attention once more as I look at the latest evolutions that we have for children growing up. In many cases the parents seem to be trying to ensure that the children have all the opportunities that the parents may not have had and/ or that the children don't make any mistakes so that they can keep progressing towards the top of the ladder. In doing so the parents consistently take over the activity and build it into a superlative sporting establishment or performing arts program.  They are quick to point out that they are just trying to give the children the best possible activity. They sign up programs after school and perhaps before school so the children can work on the  minute aspects of their activity to try and achieve the top level.

The trouble with this is it can quickly evolve into the type of programs I saw in South Korea some decades ago.  There the government wanted everyone to learn English. So  many Englishlearniing programs were created during or after school. At the same time other programs opened up for the children to become better soccer players, or to play instruments, or become involved in some other program into the evening. This regularly took the children to some hours late at night. Once the children got home they would  do their homework  and then to bed with little other time to  act or select an event of their own choosing. If that is your goal for your child  that may be a good program to follow. I believe that is an erroneous system.

I am not sure why we have 3rd graders who have to attend practice multiple times a week at a field  not close to their ownhome or school and play games scattered around the metropolitan area or beyond. The kids want to participate and do it with their friends and have fun. All of the other extra structure and controls are added by the parents who are reliving their adult life in place of their children. This occurs way too often and can be seen as the parents and coaches yell and cheer and send signals as if they're at a professional game or event. At times the players even wind up crying as they don't really understand all the extra directives and consternation when something doesn't go right. If you watch a Little League gamethe batter receives multiple signals from the coach before he steps in to try and hit the next pitch. I'm sorry but these are 11 and 12 year olds. They do not need major league structure for their play. A further example of the excess of expectations is the Tommy John surgery that occurs. This is a very difficult  armsurgery that used to be performed only on major league pitchers. Now the majority of these operations are performed on 15 to 19 year olds. The patients are becoming younger and younger as the young players feel the pressure to perform at a higher level. The players should be having fun and learning how to play. The parents and coaches bring the excess. Another example of the absurd is  the televising of football games by seventh and eighth graders. This is not what development levels of kids sports were intended to be.

Even the basic structure of Little League seems mixed up. The season starts in early spring and effectively is over by early June. The teams then start playing tournaments and all stargames such that by the middle to 3rd week of June only a few of the players are playing any longer. In tournaments  once you lose you're out of the tournament. In essence after one  or a couple rounds of a tournament you're eliminated. This winds up with July and August (which one would think is a season for lots of baseball) devoid of baseball for most of the young playerswho are done because the important thing is to have enough playoff games to get to the final two teams playing in Pennsylvania.  All of the players on all the other teams are left out playing no baseball for most of the summer.  

Another misconception is travel teams. There seems to be a feeling now that when a child is playing a sport in high school and may hope to play in college they have to be on a travel team perhaps even starting back in middle school or earlier. In theory,on a travel team the player develops their talent  better against awhole mixture of different people and they can improve their level of play. They also may get exposure to coaches at colleges at various places if they play in those areas. These teams call for considerable additional expenses for the parents but it is not clear how much it really improves the players playing ability except that they play that many more games and in order to do this they miss events and classes at home. I recently saw whereplayers were asked to complete applications  for coaches  at  colleges. The applications not only asked for the high school and high school coach but it asked for the name of the playerstravel team and their travel team coach. I was surprised that there was now an expectation that athletes had a travel team.What about the the high school student who would like to playtwo or three  sports and/or has other interests.

Thoughts

I understand that much of my contemplations above simply look like  I want to turn back the clock. That is partly true. However I want to see the structure of kids sports and other  activities become extracurricular activities with enough time  left for the children and youth of our country to grow up enjoying their extracurricular activities while they're learning their academics in school and enjoying their time with their friends.

Silence Dogood

Copies of all prior posts of this blog may be found at:  thoughtscm,com

Water Resources

Musings

Compared with most places in the world the North American continent and the United States are blessed with an abundance of water. We have many rivers and lakes and we have the Great Lakes which constitute the largest accumulation of fresh water in the world. The southwest is dryer but has an amount of precipitation, including from it's surrounding mountains and coastline, that it generally can support a modest amount of plant life. With all of this water everywhere it should be one of our problems of least concern. However, the problem seems to be we are grossly overusing our water resources and abusing them and  paying little or no attention to the problem.

In spite of the hoopla over the election this year the politicians in the United States should be spending a reasonable amount of time and energy trying to address the questions of how to best use and protect our water resources. As always we seem to have a lot of noise with regard to that issue but little action. A number of committees meet and experts prepare reports but this does not lead to the efforts needed to protect our water resources. We  need to wake up orsomeday soon or we will discover what we have lost the fight to protect our water.

Contemplations

In spite of our abundance of water we have numerous episodes in progress of it's being overused and polluted instead of parceled out  and protected. This is true in almost all areas of the country. The eastern half of the country has this issue on a lesserbasis. However, it should not be overlooked in the area east of the Mississippi. It was only a few years ago that the states of Georgia, Alabama and Florida had an intense legal fight over the headwaters of the Chattahoochee River as their water demands increased. This litigation lasted over 10 years. The basic problem was there was no comprehensive plan that had been laid out for how to divide the waters of these southern rivers as southern states increased in population and agricultural efforts. Inherently all those increases means increased demands on the water resources. As generally happens throughout the United States no one was paying much attention to the potential for the water to be overallocated, used and polluted as long as each was getting the share they needed to keep going. That is a recipe for a series of serious conflicts.

The water resources issue becomes more promenent as wecrosse the Mississippi River. The hallmark for this has generally been the Ogallala Aquifer.  The Ogallala Aquifer lies in a shallow water table beneath the Great Plains. It exists in portions of eight states throughout the plains, an area of approximately 175,000 square miles.  The area is not heavily populated. There are a few large cities such as Kansas City and Oklahoma Citybut it is mostly an area of farms which are abundant and productive. Farming accounts for 94% of the water usage taken out of the aquifer. However, once again there is limited control or plans for allocating the water out of the aquifer and numerous wells are pumping it out at a rapid pace such that within the next 50 years it should be 3/4 depleted and additionally subject to periodic droughts that may occur. Without sufficient rainfall leaching down to the aquifer it cannot be replenished.  To protect the aquifer any studies and action should be taken now so that it can be replenished on regular basis with amounts of additional water leaching from the surface and sufficient levels of ground water can be protected. However,  little action is taking place because each of these states is able  to keep using the water on the existing basis and indeed an increasing basis. In essence the politicians don't want to act because they don't have to act yet. This is like never taking protective measures for your home, business or other assets; just wait until the fire or storm or other event occurs and then rush to do what you can.

As we get to the southwest we have the driest part of the United States. The mountains there sometimes get enough rainfall and snow cap to produce water for the growing metropolitan populations and farming in those areas. However, as the soils are very productive and everyone is interested in having this year's crop be a strong crop, producing a good profit at this time, few politicians want to entertain ideas which will reduce the amount of water available for additional commercial development,residential development and or reduce the amount of farming produce from this productive area. Therefore, it is left as something to be contemplated but action does not occur.

California has the largest population in the country with massively growing commercial areas and has spent some amount of time addressing the water issues but never enough time and funds to achieve a result. Indeed the idea of desalinization by plants along the ocean has been considered but avoided because it is quite expensive. Instead numerous schemes have been put forth or enacted to purchase the water from lakes in the mountains, build bigger reservoirs, restrain use of water and other measures without creating political backlash before the next election cycle. Hence there has been some effort to address the problem but on an insufficient scale.

Going inland we run into Arizona, Nevada and Utah. All of these states suffer from the same mentality of we want more growth and growth takes water so we'll try and find a way to limit the water the growth takes but we want more growth. They also enjoy their productive farm areas and they don't want to deplete those. What this has done is left an unregulated use of water under western water law which is very wasteful. 80% of Arizona's groundwater is unregulated. That means that the various surface owners own the water rights and use it or sell it at their leasure. Sense no one likes government regulation there has been a hesitancy to impose regulations on how all thisoccurs. An example is the new developments in Arizona which have no water but have to buy their water from other adjacent properties and have it trucked in under contract. When the contract expires the people that were getting their water through the contract delivery have no water. They then have to proceed further out in some direction or another to try and find more water that can be trucked into them. The question becomes why were the residences allowed to be built if they did not already have water rights associated with them. Indeed some amount of the Arizona sprawl will have to be made subject to water rights and not allowed to be permitted without it. That will cause great umbrage by  developers and those who are claiming private property rights but without it this episode of constantly building more without the necessary implements for living there will continue. An interesting example is the three micro-chip factories that the federal government help sponsor and are supposedly being built in Arizona which will bring in 6000 new workers when there is no water. How did the state government and the federal government dream this up  brilliant plan when they're not able to provide water the 6000 new workers and the owners of the chip plants expect.

Utah has a similar problem with great Salt Lake. In order to encourage its development and agriculture it has consistently allowed the water coming off of the mountains in Utah to be sucked up for development projects and agriculture. The end result is lack of water  reaching Great Salt Lake. If you go there today you will see a lake that is 1/3 of what it was a few decades ago. Research by Brigham Young University suggests that the lake is in danger of disappearing within five years. As the lake disappears the flocks of birds and other wildlife that use the lake will be forced off or perish and the remaining sand/ dust, with its toxic effect, will proceed to be blown onto Salt Lake City and all the other communities bordering the lake as dust storms pick up the sand and dust at the bottom of the lake and blow it around on all of the commercial and residential communities that were built and used up Great Salt Lake's water. Obviously there is a need to enact statewide  legislation that forces the water from the precipitation in the mountains to be allowed to follow the natural courses down to the lake and so it can start refilling Great Salt Lake. The alternative is to wind up with a dry lake bed contaminating the surrounding areas such as the Aral Sea that the Soviet Union created with its 5 year agricultural plans'

Multiple western rivers create similar examples of water that is overused and being fought over. The Colorado River supposedly has water allocated to seven states, multiple Native American tribes and the country of Mexico. Its reservoirs are down to 30 percent capacity. Everyone claims one of the other users has an excess allocation and is overusing its allocation. Nothing motivates them to solve the problem because of the political ramifications of giving up any water to one of the other users. A similar problem has occurred in Northern California and Oregon where the farmers and the salmon fishermen are fighting over the flows in the river because taking too much water out for the crops does not allow the salmon to use the river and vice versa. These problems are endemic around the country.

There are many more instances where our farming, industrialand residential uses have polluted waterways. One of the best known is Lake Erie which now has toxic algae blooms on the west end of the lake in the late summer from all of the excess fertilizer put on the farms in Ohio and Michigan that washes down into the lake and feeds algae. The farmers keep putting the fertilizer on their crops to get a better crop and the lake keeps deteriorating. This problem is not uncommon in areas where there has not been sufficient effort to have the farmers reduce their fertilizer and contain their animal waste from the herds of animals that they are keeping.

Thoughts

This is a very busy political season. The interesting feature of the problem of our water resources is that the issue is known and the solutions are there but they can only be implemented if there is enough determination by the politicians to enact laws and regulations that will control the pollution and the overuse so that our abundant water resources can continue to support our privileged lifestyle. So far we have just come up with patchwork solutions such as moving water around to have more in an area that uses too much. Indeed that is so common  that it is brought up in the Southwestern states to suggest that they should get ahold of some water from the Great Lakes and start using it in the southwest where it would be more productive than just having big lakes. That is an interesting thought except that thecorrection would be very expensive and given our history of what we do when we get a resource is as fast as we built the pipelines to suck up the water from the Great Lakes we would just overuse it  in an excessive fashion  around the SouthwestThere's no reason to suspect there would be a decent regulation of water that is brought in whether from the Great Lakes or lakes in Canada or anywhere else. This is a question of political willpower. Unfortunately right now that willpower is lacking. Let us hope it appears soon.

Silence Dogood

All copies of this blog that have been posted are available at:   thoughtscm.com

Naval Conundrum

Musings

The United States Navy has a problem which is a three headed hydra. It exists to protect our country from others overseas, and to protect our citizens and companies when they are involved overseas and are wrongfully treated in violation of treaties or in some other manner. The problem arises because it is very hard to cover the oceans of the entire world without a large number of ships, sailors and funds to operate them. The directions for the Navy and how to handle these duties comes from the president, as commander in chief, but also from the congress that appropriates its budget each year and then from the senior officers at the pentagon which give it the direct military orders for the fleets to function.

This doesn't seem too confusing except that the president, the congress, and the bureaucracy at the pentagon each have a way of promulgating the actions and funds for each year in a manner that don't meet what the other heads of the hydra are directing, and are insufficient for the actions the Navy is asked to undertake. This is in spite of all the planning and exercises the Navy does to try and anticipate how to handle major international problems spread across the oceans and to keep its ships on a rotated schedule, These three sources of directives constantly run afoul of each other.

This silliness in Washington DC, of everyone directing the Navy in a different direction, has gone on for decades. It would seem that if the Navy is going to serve the functions for which it exists the president and the congress are going to have to agree upon a budget that they will actually fund and the pentagon is going to have to establish a deployment schedule that can actually meet the needs of all the various ships and sailors that man them.

Contemplations

The Navy is not hesitant to sail in harm's way. As different squadrons returned to the United States from their latest deployments the senior officers tell us that they are prepared to conduct operations for as long as needed. That is their intention. They do not want to be sitting in port while the action passes them by. This has been true throughout our history; in the Revolutionary War we had numerous privateers that captured hundreds of British ships, John Paul Jones defeated the British frigate Serapis within sight of the British coastline in his famous battle, the navy's initial amphibious assault captured a British ammunition base in the Bahamas; soon thereafter the Navy engaged in a so-called Quasi War with France defeating a number of the French frigates from the French revolutionary navy; the Navy then moved on to fight the Barbary Pirates in the Mediterranean Sea over 3000 miles from the United States and eventually prevailed after the end of the War of 1812; in the War of 1812 the Navy won a number of engagements with the British,

it then had it's first massive amphibious assault in the Mexican American War with the capture of Veracruz by sea; next the Navy's Anaconda strategy and blockade strangled the confederate states both on the Atlantic seaboard and along the Mississippi River to deny the rebellion of the supplies that it's so badly needed; the Navy then engaged in the Spanish American War, and the United States Navy bottled up and sank the Spanish Navy in Cuba and Admiral Dewey fleet sank the Spanish Navy in the Philippines and captured Manila; in World War I when the United States entered in 1917 it sent its battleship fleet over to join the British at their base at Scapa Flow. The British sailors were beside themselves with excitement and cheering as the United States ships sailed into Scapa flow as it insured the power of the British fleet already there and the naval supremacy in that war; in World War II the Navy anticipated that it would be fighting Japan but it made the wrong preparations and started off with serious loss but then regathered itself to fight innumerable battles with the Japanese that wore down the Japanese fleet and left it mostly sunken hulks and the German submarine service with the highest casualty rate in the War; after World War II the Navy has engaged in the Korean War, Vietnam War, both Persian Gulf Wars and answered the call for numerous other engagements.

United States Navy has always been willing to sail in harm's way. It is now the only Navy that tries to address issues on a worldwide basis. The problem is it is a big world and it is very hard to have enough ships to cover all of the different missions that might arise around the world. Indeed it must be remembered that the ships cannot always be deployed, They have to rotate back to the states both to give their sailors some leave and time at home and to do the refurbishing that needs to be done after these massive machines sail and fight for 7, 9 or 11 months in a row. Thus, a large percentage of the ships are often " in the yards" and not available to respond to new issues at sea.

The Navy currently has approximately 360 to 370 ships. It has produced a plan to rotate those on a revolving basis so that it will have the ships it needs in the different locations around the world. However, very often the ships that are expected to be available are not because they went into the yards and it took much longer to do the refurbishing than was expected. In addition, the ship construction budget that is anticipated by the Pentagon is often adjusted by Congress either to add or delete certain ships that were not in the original schedule of the Pentagon so that, for example, a submarine that might be awaiting refurbishing might actually be waiting in port for 3 to 5 years between deployments. It is very hard to anticipate a regular rotation of ships when this issue exits. Obviously there needs to be some restructuring of the budget process so that it is set at a known number. It also means that congressmen should quit meddling to try and be sure the contracts for the various ship refurbishments and the equipment that go on them are not given to companies in their district or state contrary to the Pentagon plans to award those on a regular and logical basis. There are going to have to be occasions where congressmen cannot stuff money into their favorite companies' pockets.

The most difficult part of this sequence is the aircraft carriers. There are currently 11 of the aircraft carriers functioning, it could rise to 12 depending upon how the schedules operate, but the number is insufficient based upon the deployments that are currently considered necessary. For example, we are concerned about China and so we keep an aircraft carrier in Japan we also try to have some

aircraft carriers in the East Asian area and the Indian Ocean as those areas seem to be somewhat volatile and we then have the problem of where do we need carriers in the Middle East to respond to issues. This is particularly a problem right now while Israel is in another of its interminable wars with the Palestinians. Finally we have the Ukrainian war with Russia where we like to be prepared to respond to issues that may arise, and we have the other uncertain situations in the Middle East with regard to Syria and Iraq. If you take one-half of the 11 carriers and put them in the yards for their refurbishing and refresher training you quickly can see that there are not enough carriers to go around. Right now that problem is solved by just having the carriers stay longer on station, so instead of a 7 month deployment, they sometimes wind up with 9 or 11 months on deployment. These long deployments wear down the ship and the crew and that will mean more maintenance when the ship gets back to the yards and a reduced morale of the crew who told their family they were leaving for 7 months and wound up being gone most of a year.

This last aspect of morale is particularly important because the sailors are the people that keep the ships operating. The more you affect their morale the more likely they are to complete their enlistment in the Navy and resign. That means you must go recruit new sailors, train them and bring them on board. It is much preferable to have the seasoned, well functioning sailors stay on board. Further, the Navy currently has a shortage in its recruitment of about 9000 men a year. This is true of all of the armed services except for the marines. With a shortfall of 9000 men the Navy cannot afford to allow morale issues to start causing more of their enlisted ranks and junior officers to resign and go into civilian life. They must operate on a schedule that those members of the Navy find acceptable.

All of this means that the Navy must either be given significantly larger budgets each year to build more ships, increase maintenance schedules and pay higher salaries and bonuses or reduce the number of deployments and assignments to trouble spots that arise in the world. Further, many of these ships are interactive and anticipate operating with each other. An aircraft carrier will usually anticipate operating with a squadron that includes a couple destroyers, perhaps a cruiser, one or two amphibious ships and perhaps a supply ship and one or two submarines. Thus you'd have not just one large ship with thousands of men on it, you have a squadron with many thousands of men on it and they are all deploying and functioning in unison. This also means that at the end of the deployment all these ships return to their home ports San Diego, Norfolk, etcetera and have to go into some level of refurbishing. They are then unavailable for most deployments except for the greatest of emergencies. Once they get into the yards they are essentially torn apart to fix things and replace equipment and when finished must go through refresher training to be ready to operate at sea. All of these same issues currently enfeeble the Coast Guard.

This haphazard schedule of deployments and refurbishing is not good for the Navy. It needs to be redone in a realistic manner that the Navy can come close to following. There are always uncertainties that have to be addressed but the current system is simply unsustainable.

Thoughts

Because congressmen, senators and the president are all politicians and ultimately make a large percentage, if not most, of their decisions based on some kind of political point of view this problem should be taken and delivered to some type of committee that has authority to create a multi -year budget, delete the types of deployments that we are no longer going to jump and run to, and increase the number of shipyards that are able to function on a regular basis to meet the Navy's schedule, and structure the ship rotations on a basis that will keep the sailors and junior officers happy and progressing in the Navy instead of in the civilian world. There have been plenty of committees in the past that made plans for rotation such as the Navy's Optimized Fleet Response Plan in 2014. It did not last. The committee cannot just be there to make a nice document that will go on the shelf and be ignored by the next politician or Pentagon bureaucrats that don't like it. It must be force fed to the politicians and the Pentagon bureaucracy and if different deployments and issues suggest that there is a missing aspect of the plan it must be amended to correct it. The things that we cannot do must be dropped. Perhaps we will have to quit sending forces to the Middle East to try and calm that area. Some of these ships are also used for large exercises to further train seamen and officers. Maybe those exercises have to be reduced or eliminated and/or be run while the ships are operating on their deployed schedule. Some naval officers, with limited input from the politicians, have to come up with this plan, and it has to be accepted and put into place on a multi-year basis. Right now we are just scrambling.

Obadiah Plainman

copies of all previously posted issues of this blog are available at: thoughtscm.com

The Mystery of Our Nations Borders

Musings

I don't understand the problem and consternation  with our nations borders. We seem to have way too many people coming across the borders and they are not tabulated or documented as they come across the border. Some stop at the border stations and get acknowledged as someone who is seeking asylum, usually for economic reasons, and others cross  swimming rivers, crossing a desert or in some other manner. The odd part is particularly the way we treat this migration of people into our country. There is a migration of poor people toward richer countries all over the world. Europe also seems to have a serious problem of people that are looking for a new country for economic reasons and coming from Africa in the Middle East  on a large scale  but I do not believe it is as uncontrolled  as in the United States.

Regardless, even with our large number of people on border patrol, and even though we have very extensive borders, we do very little to document, control or turn back these people. Indeed, it seems to be that when they reach the border and claim asylum for economic reasons, in some manner they are given a designation and told to go ahead and enter the country and return at some point in time to be considered for immigration.  And that system is years behind schedule.

As I read some of the information on this the numbers seem to exceed 100,000 in some years of the Biden administration but are now down to approximately 60,000 new immigrants a year, I find those numbers  mind boggling. Can it be that our government  is happy that the new immigrants only number 5,000 a month most of whom have not been approved for immigration.

What else is mind boggling is that Congress seems to feel that this is a great issue to treat as partisan and squabble and not reach a resolution on the issue. The Republicans and Democrats apparently are too incompetent to resolve this issue when it seems to me it is simply a question of having people apply and only allow a certain number of people into this country each day based on our population needs.

Contemplations

There was apparently an agreement between the Republicans and Democrats in Congress on some type of resolution to the border problem that was  approved by both parties and ready to pass when Donald Trump inserted himself and insisted that the Republicans back out of the deal and leave the border problem unresolved. That should not be a surprise to anyone. Donald Trump wanted the border as an issue he could exploit in the election and he didn't want it to all of a sudden be solved before he could try and use that to win votes. The sad part is that the Republicans in Congress didn't have enough fortitude to tell Donald to find other issues to run on and go ahead and pass the border agreement.

As I understand it the border agreement was kept confidential so that it would not cause a flare up between the parties. Therefore as it was killed by Trump's inserting himself we don't  know what might have  been put forth except that it was a supposed resolution.

Having missed that opportunity to address the border problem, we still have the question of why this is an issue that can't be solved.  While he was in office Trump supposedly came up with  ways to reduce the number of people crossing the border even though many of those ideas seem to be somewhat absurd such as separating children from their parents. His efforts brought the monthly number of people crossing the border and seeking asylum to approximately 60,000 per year. I believe the most recent analysis of crossings suggests  that number is once again down to about 60,000 per year. It is suggested that this is due to some new rules imposed by president Biden that limited the number of people that could be accepted as seeking asylum if the number crossing the border fell below1500 per day for 2  weeks ! As I read about this new more stringent policy I was confused.  If Trump with his  brash policy only reduced border crossings to 60,000 per  year and Biden has achieved the same number and believes this is a policy victory I don't understand what is the policy of the United States. There is even the suggestion that if the current efforts cause the number of people crossing the border to fall too low  then we might have to open up the border to get more people to cross into the United states to assist in the job market!

All these numbers seem to me to be bureaucratic babble from Washington DC by both parties. There should be a logical program and structure for those from other countries that want to enter the United States. They should apply and if they are found eligible, they get in line to be allowed into the United states to work. They want to come here to earn money to take care of their family and or themselves and so they're coming here for economic reasons. If they are allowed in then it seems to me it would be something more akin to the green card policy in which someone has a card allowing them to come into the United States to work and then they must return home periodically. If they're coming here to earn money for their economic purposes there's no reason why they should be considered for citizenship or other issues that seem to get bogged down in this discussion. If they come here and live permanently for a certain number of years, and handle other matters that are beneficial to the country, then perhaps they can apply for citizenship otherwise there is no reason why citizenship follows from someone who comes here to work for economic reasons.

I also don't understand why any person who is allowed to cross the border is not booked in the computer and given an identification number and told where they should go and how often they should report back at a government office. If they're interested in going to North Dakota fine or if they're interested in going to East Los Angeles fine but the computer should know that and if they change that location they should report in. There is no reason why a  series of simple requirements like that cannot be made clear for people  if they want to come into the country to work. If they come into the country without receiving a designation/number from the border patrol they should be escorted back across the border and not be considered for entry.

It is a mystery to me why 60,000 is an acceptable number of people to allow into the country that are undocumented. As much as the Republicans like to complain about undocumented immigrants and the need  to have a decent immigration policy they seem to be just as much as fault as the Democrats. I don't understand why they can't put a program in place, close the border and start over to review the people who have  applied and anybody who wants to come into the United States  must get documented with an ID number and given a limited series of instructions on where they can go and what they can do. If they violate that they will be sent home. On a parallel track the huge number of undocumented  immigrants must  be directed to get an ID card and go through a review process or they will be sent back across the border.

It is appropriate to declare a moratorium on new immigrants.  We have lost control of the immigration process.  Shut it down until we have caught up with the immigration already in the country and that awaiting at the border.

Finally, the existing laws should be reviewed  and eliminate those that don't work. For example, it does not seem to make sense to have a category for economic hardship as a reason to admit people.  That group includes billions of people.  We can't take them all.  A group to expedite their entry is those with skills we need, say micro chip engineers. Merely being a relative of someone already in the United States should not be a reason for admission.  Those people can visit on a visa. The existing laws must be sorted out.

Thoughts

It is obvious that Congress has played games with the migration and border issue for many years. It has gone on so long that it is now not just a problem but pathetic. Supposedly we have approximately 12 million or more people in the country that are undocumented. I don't care if they're working at very important jobs or what else they're doing for our country they should be identified, receive an ID number either through a state or the federal government and be known individuals who are paying their taxes, receiving the government benefits and working for the economic reasons that they identified when they entered the country.  The members of congress are afraid to face the consequences of fixing the issue because they fear it will  cause a loss of political status with their party. I think we should let all of the congressmen and senators know if they don't solve it they will not be reelected. There's no reason to keep sending these people back to Washington and have them complain that this is a difficult issue and it is not easy to solve. It is easy to solve, both sides need to compromise and move forward. They just have to sit down in a room, perhaps lock the door, and not come out until they have a solution. Some such attitude is needed and right now it is lacking.

Silence Dogood

All prior postings of this blog can be found at:    thoughtscm.com

Not So Fast Democrats

Musings

So, Joe is out and who is in?

As Joe was the president most people immediately said well, OK, who is vice president and moved to that person for the Democratic choice to be nominated for president. That is Kamala Harris. A majority of Democrats, but not all, seem to have lined up in her camp.

It is interesting that having thought about their presidential nomination as if they were almost brain dead, nominating an 81 year old person and intentionally structuring the primary season to give him a head start over any other candidates, which turned out to be a poor choice in terms of. ultimate popular appeal for the election, they are so cavalier. That now raises the question of how cautious and analytical are the Democrats with regard to their selection of a replacement for Joe Biden ? They seem to have jumped to Kamala Harris, the current vice president, almost as fast as Joe Biden sent out his letter withdrawing. I had trouble detecting an ounce of brain wave from  the commentators and politicians that I saw on television. In terms of making that decision they just went down the list and picked the next person. I am not sure that is a good way to make this selection.

Contemplations

It seems when you are making a selection of who to nominate for president the first thing that you do is determine your goals. The Democrats number one goal in this election is to defeat Donald Trump and JD Vance. They will then want to also defeat as many Republicans as they can in down  ballot races for House of Representatives, Senate, governors and state legislators. I have not seen a single Democratic politician or a single reporter and commentator go through that analysis. If those are your goals, who is the candidate who is most likely to allow you to achieve your goals?

There is not a lot of time for this process, but there is time to do it. It just has to be thought through and sufficient analysis has to be given to sort out the person or persons who might fit for the Democrats  to achieve their goal(s).

My comments are not directed at Kamala Harris. I have not kept close track of her performance as vice president but then I don't think most of the voting public has either. Many Democrats  believe she has done a good job as vice president and want to reward her with a chance to run for president. That is a nice thought and  use of Democratic party thought. However, party thought is not necessarily a good idea here. Indeed, the Democrats have a history of not thinking too much about what they are doing, and lining up elections poorly. The issue is not how good of a Democrat. Kamala will be as president but can she win the election. In essence, beating Trump is the number one  issue. That should dominate the question of who will be the Democratic nominee for president? I don't mean by rationalizing how Kamala fits that criteria. I mean by analyzing the criteria and asking amongst all the Democratic candidates, who best fits the criteria.

It is not that hard to make up a list of all of the major Democratic possibilities for president. They should then be scrutinized to see who is willing to seek such a job. Then they must be reviewed as to who is likely to succeed. Hopefully that gives you three to five candidates, or a different number, that might be considered at the convention next month. That is not a difficult number to process at a convention and  it happened many times before. The nation is not in a position to root a for favorite persons anymore. The choice must be the most likely person to beat Trump.

I have previously suggested that I believe the election will be won or lost in the middle. That would be independent voters and disgruntled Republican voters that do not want to vote for Trump but were not willing to support the Biden administration. Therefore, the person who can pick up the Democratic votes and collect those votes in the middle is the individual who is most likely to win the election. I have suggested that the nominee should not be from one of the more liberal states as they will  just be tabbed with the notion of "liberal" and not to be considered by any number of moderates and those with more conservative viewpoints. Also, I believe the nominee should be a female. Those may be appropriate, criteria, or they may be adjusted to fit other categorizations. Nevertheless, that is the process that needs to take place.

Thoughts

As I look at how the Democrats need to view this election, they need a younger, more vibrant person who does not have an excessive liberal tag on them. Some liberal leanings are just fine. But, for example, the governor of New York will just get badgered to no end on how liberal she is, whether that is a fair analysis or not. I believe Kamala Harris will just be badgered as a liberal because she was in the Biden administration, whether that is a fair analysis or not and therefore I believe the Democratic Party should look to their leading female candidates from the Midwest or the West for someone who fits the criteria. In particular, I believe a person who is a governor, who has  run all of the state operations, to serve multiple groups of individuals, is going  be  in the best position as a chief administrator to present the leadership appeal  needed.

It  is hard to understand the process in which  the Democrats are engaged. They are all just off and running saying Joe is out, let's declare Kamala in and let's keep going. I have not seen any analytical process to justify what seems to be occurring within the Democratic Party. The convention is coming up. I would hope that they get a strong analytical process underway soon.

Obadiah Plainman

Copies of all of the versions of this blog which have previously been posted are available at: thoughtscm.com

Perceptions of the Democratic Campaign to Nominate a Presidential Candidate

Musings

The Democrats nominate their presidential candidate at their convention. Their convention is slated to start on August 19th. They are over five weeks out from that date. Presumably they are embarked in a expensive, well directed campaign to nominate two democratic candidates for president and vice president and promote their other down ballot candidates for the House of Representatives, the Senate, and the various state offices. There is some activity on the down ballot issues but not too much. There is an excess of activity on the presidential nomination.

Of recent years the parties have always been interested in trying to avoid any true primary contests so that they could promote a consensus candidate and save their money for the general election. In doing that they have staged the primaries to basically give one candidate the nomination and move on towards the general election. The Democrats are now five weeks out from their convention and have no idea of what to do or how they got where they are.

Joe Biden wanted to run for reelection and since he was the sitting president the party lined up behind him and structured the campaign so that he would move into that slot. The clearest example of this was when the Democrats decided not to start their campaign in Iowa at the caucuses but instead moved it to a primary in South Carolina. The Democrats were afraid that Biden may be embarrassed in the Iowa caucuses and the subsequent primaries and scuttle his nomination in those early contests. That is exactly what happened in 2008 when Barack Obama, a first term senator from Illinois who had not even finished his first term, was able to step forward and bounce the parties alleged "consensus candidate" Hillary Clinton in the Iowa caucuses and proceeded to defeat her consistently in the primaries thereafter. To avoid that the democratic national committee readjusted their early contests to replace Iowa and move the South Carolina primary up as the first contest. That was done at the request of Joe Biden as he had some strong supporters in South Carolina amongst black voters. Under the pretense of that South Carolina was more representative of the national electorate it's primary was moved ahead of Iowa. This was just a setup. South Carolina had not voted for a democratic presidential candidate in the general election in a number of years and showed no inclination to do that in 2024. This was just a way to allow Joe Biden to win a primary to open the voting season and give his campaign that boost.

Successively Joe Biden was able to push any other democratic candidates aside and roll up primary votes as the spring ended and the Democrats looked forward to their convention in August. However, the egos of Joe Biden, the White House staff and the democratic party forgot to contemplate that all this was early in the process and they overstepped themselves. Joe Biden even signed an agreement to debate Donald Trump in June when neither one of them would be a nominated candidate. Both candidates were unpopular, both were too old to be running for president and the Democrats forgot to contemplate that they could have a misstep. In the debate

Joe Biden had a serious misstep. He did not perform well. Many perceived him as too old and that is how he performed. That sunk his approval ratings.

Contemplations

Joe Biden now finds himself in the position that many of the voters who were dubious of both he and Donald Trump have now seen Joe Biden perform poorly on a debate stage. Joe wants everyone to understand that was just a bad night and he will really do much better in the future. However, that is a hard case to sell when you're 81 years old already and the population that has to vote on you is already dubious of your ability. Joe confirmed their perception. They were also dubious of Trump's ability, but as incoherent as Trump's answers were he did not stumble as bad as Joe Biden in the debate.

The end result is that the Biden campaign chose this debate and now they have to live with the result. The result is that many people including Democrats that supported Joe Biden are suggesting that he drop his campaign and someone else replace him. Joe Biden and his entourage are spending a great deal of time trying to downplay that position and arguing a number of senseless excuses, such as Joe had a difficult schedule the week before, Joe had a cold, Joe needs to rest more from all of his activities as president. It does not make sense that Joe Biden couldn't be prepared for a debate with someone as incomprehensible as Donald Trump but will perform well for the next four years until he is 85!

The end result of this is that instead of the Democrats spending their time and money on a strong marketing campaign to attack Donald Trump and his campaign and age ( and there never seems to have been an easier candidate to attack), Joe Biden and the democrats are spending their time trying to suggest that Joe Biden is fine and is the right candidate. They are not spending their time and money promoting their platform and the democratic candidates. This is exactly the strategy that the republicans want to achieve. Send the opposition off in the wrong direction.

This is a dilemma that does not have an answer in the form of Joe Biden's "continue as before." Joe Biden should step aside. But how do the Democrats go about replacing him. If Joe won't step aside the Democrats have an incurable problem and just have to hope some other unexpected events allow them to move ahead of Donald Trump in the election contest. If Joe's ego won't let him step aside it will be a serious problem as the Democrats are likely to self destruct squabbling with themselves while Donald Trump becomes president. Hopefully someone is explaining that to Joe Biden.

If Joe Biden agrees to step aside a number of ideas have been proposed.

One is to simply line up behind Kamala Harris. As the vice president there is a logic to that and she has earned it. However, I am dubious of that logic. Regardless of how well Kamilla served as vice president she is closely associated with the Biden white house and if the Democrats are trying to attract those voters in the middle and the 10 to 15% of Republicans that did not vote for Trump

in the republican primaries but voted for Nikki Haley, then they must present a candidate that does not look closely tied to the Biden white house and its policies. Further, since both candidates appeared to only have support and approximately the low to mid 40s of the voting population before the debates it would seem clear that the Democrats have to go after the independent voters in the middle and the disgruntled Republicans if they expect to win. That's why I don't believe Kamala is the right choice.

There is also the idea of holding a quick primary. I am dubious of that as the last set of open primaries between the Democrats and the Republicans simply showed many people jumping into the pot most of whom received little support but offered significant distraction. To declare, organize and hold those primaries in 5 weeks seems dubious. They would certainly get a lot of press attention but their results are likely to have more problems than the desired outcome.

There is also the issue that all of the Democrats' scrambling around to decide what to do and replace Joe Biden will give the republican campaign additional ammunition to simply gloat over how Trump chased Biden out of the campaign. The Democrats have find a way to resolve this issue without everyone talking to everyone else and especially all of the reporters creating multiple stories about the replacement of Joe Biden every day in the news.

With so little time and no good options it seems to me that a consortium of the top Democrats have to find a way to communicate with each other and find one or perhaps two or three candidates to present at the convention. The problem is all politicians seem to have the need to talk too much. As soon as they know something they run and tell someone else and they have to tell their favorite reporter, who of course swears secrecy but then somehow all these things leak out. That type of situation is very damaging to the Democrats it suggests they were just running around not knowing what to do.

As the Democrats look through their potential candidates for a national campaign who have shown serious potential they need to reduce those individuals to a few people and structure the end result for a vote at the convention.

Thoughts

I believe that many of the leading democratic candidates to replace Joe Biden should not be considered because they will have a more difficult time bringing in the votes from the independents and the disgruntled Republicans. The Democrats cannot just nominate a new Biden team with a different person on top. They have to have a more conservative and middle of the road appeal. That eliminates some excellent candidates like Kamala Harris. I believe that also eliminates any democratic candidate from the Northeast or the West Coast which simply by their geography will be perceived as liberal candidates. Further I believe the party needs a female at the head of the ticket. I am also dubious of someone who is either a senator or a member of the House of Representatives. Those two branches of Congress are perceived to have a dismal record over the last four years. It is not their failure to make those efforts but it is the fact that Congress is split

approximately 50/50 and as the Democrats tried to take actions they were constantly stymied by the Republicans. Therefore I do not believe there are any members of the Congress that have a strong background too be nominated. It isn't their effort or attempts it's the result that Congress produces. Further, I understand that early in Biden's presidency some number of bills got passed to fight the inflation and pandemic and had some bipartisan support, however I don't believe the public has much of a memory of those results. The Biden white house keeps trying to remind everybody of those results but I believe the national polling shows that hardly anyone is paying attention to those first years of his administration.

The way I categorize the democrats candidates that leaves the Democrats with very few choices as they contemplate who they might nominate to at the democratic convention. A female governor, who has a strong campaigning record who can give a perception of being a strong voice with some conservative appeal and can carry a number of centrist voters.

Silence Dogood

The previous versions of this blog that have been posted can be found at: Thoughtscm.com

What Are Democrats to Do?

Musings

A debate occurred last week between Joe Biden and Donald Trump. This was a silly event except to the CNN network and the two individuals who each had enough ego to feel that they could out talk to the other one and therefore they were willing to engage in a debate that had no meaning for informing the nations electorate. Both of these individuals have been president and were know politicians.

The commentary that has come out of the debate seems to be that the two parties continue to hold their same views but Joe Biden lost his train of thought on more than one occasion and did not present well. This is blamed on his age. Since Joe Biden is 81 and Donald Trump is 78 it is easy to blame the stumbles that each of them had in the debate and have had in prior appearances on age. They are both too old to be running for president and too old to be president.

I doubt the debate changed many people's view as to who to vote for. Even if you think Joe Biden is too old, or not a very good president, or public speaker the alternative is Trump who has long been a negative voice and force in American politics. Now he seems to be taking it to the final extreme. What is interesting is that there is still a fairly large percentage of the population who anticipate voting for Trump. Most of them will profess that they don't really like him that well there's just no one else for whom to vote. That is the dilemma created by the Democratic Party. The Democrats allowed themselves to get set up in this position. They did this once before in 2016 in the Trump versus Clinton campaign and now they are back in this position again where people who don't want to vote for Trump don't have one anyone else for whom they are willing to vote.

This dilemma became much more apparent for Democrats as they watched Biden's performance in the debate. If Joe Biden is going to act and perform that way for the rest of the campaign, as well as four more years as a president, it is doubtful that the Democrats want him as a candidate.

Contemplations

Many people voted for Joe Biden and wanted him to become president in 2020 because they thought he was a better candidate than Trump and in effect wanted anybody but Trump. Given Biden's age, and the fact that he had been a Washington politician for over 50 years, I doubt many people, when they voted for him in 2020, thought in terms of having a repeat in 2024 so he could become a two term president. However, as is usually the case with politicians Joe's ego told him that he was still in top shape physically and mentally and he wanted to continue as president. This is not a surprise. Joe Biden has been running for office in Washington since the early 1970s.It's the only thing he knows and the only thing which he sees himself doing.

It is surprising that some Democrats did not talk Joe out of running for a second term while he was in his first term. Of course Joe Biden would not think they were correct but it doesn't seem that enough Democrats were willing to step forward to make the case for Joe to step down. In the usual context of yes persons, everyone around Joe Biden kept telling him he's doing a great job and yes he can run again.

Many of the people in Washington want to credit Joe Biden with having done a great job and producing legislative action however, that is a Washington DC analysis. It does carry much weight in the country. Joe mostly presents himself as someone who likes to work with other people to come up with compromises to produce results. In that regard he often seems hesitant to make a decision and produce a result. In Ukraine he keeps putting constraints on what the Ukrainians can do with the American weapons that we give them to fight against the Russians. In the Israeli war he has sent dozens of warnings to Israel to quit destroying Gaza and the Palestinian population. He has been ignored on his warnings and each new one sounds as if it was the same as the last one. He has failed to take steps which can be perceived as fixing the border dilemma. He blames congress. Most recently he has come up with some formulaic statement of how he is reducing the inflow of immigrants at the border. When I read the statement in the newspaper about his "closing of the border" I was dumbfounded. I doubt that even 10% of the population in the United States thinks he has done anything to close or control the border.

Joe Biden is a politician of the 1st order in terms of operating in Washington DC for the last 50 years. Those who are operating in the capital and following it closely can tract most of that activity, the rest of the population cannot. Joe is not perceived as having a forceful character. He is perceived as negotiating to seek some kind of result. On a broad scale Joe is in a category of a Washington politician who has been there over 50 years, spends money and caused inflation, and is having trouble espousing Democratic positions and his views in a debate because he is too old.

The Democrats can either search for a new candidate, which would probably be the smartest thing they could do, or they can try to rally round Joe Biden and boost him so that he can give the perception to the population of a strong president who will defend the basic structure of our democracy and support our allies. The key facet of this is not to keep emphasizing Joe but to praise and promote a Democratic platform that can appeal across the board to the population to elect Democratic candidates to local, state and congressional offices and the office of the president. If it is left a Biden versus Trump campaign it will be subject to more and more questions of which of these two men that are too old to be running, will make what gaffes, or become subject to what illnesses as they move forward in the next 4 months.

If the Democrats are going to stay with Biden they must hurry up and formulate a campaign that brings forth a number of their other leading personas and produces some excellent marketing materials to identify the differences between themselves and the person and program that Trump promotes. This is not a question of Democrats versus Republicans is a question of showing Trump for what he is and convince people they don't want to vote for him.

It is important to remember that in the last election Biden won by 7 million votes it was not a huge percentage victory. There must be a platform that will attract those independents who don't wish to be Democrats but don't want Trump to be elected and that 10 to 15% of the Republican Party that regularly voted in Nikki Haley's campaign who don't want Donald Trump to be president. They need to believe that the alternative will be a worthwhile program if they are to switch from

voting for Donald Trump and indeed to show up and vote at all. It must be remembered that in 2016 large numbers of voters either voted for a third party or simply voted for no one or wrote in names for president as they refused to vote for either Hillary Clinton or Donald Trump. Those voters must have something that attracts them in the Democratic platform if they are going to go with Joe Biden as their candidate. The most important thing is to beat Trump, supporting Joe Biden is secondary.

The Democrats could opt for a new candidate. Their convention begins on August 19th. Perhaps it could even be delayed, and use August 19th as the date for the platform to be determined. Most people would insist that it cannot be delayed but a delay into the beginning of September might be a good idea as the campaign is inevitably going to be too long and to shorten it by two weeks might be beneficial to the Democrats. Undoubtedly Chicago or some other city could make room to use the delayed date

From my own thoughts it strikes me Democrats want to be in a position to attract people from more conservative areas. They should not be taking a candidate from the Northeast or the West Coast where the candidates are viewed to be more liberal. Further, I believe it would be a good time to be nominating a female. I am not familiar a female from the House of Representatives or the Senate who could present any type of modestly conservative point of view to attract the middle ground. I believe a governor that has shown the ability to be in charge of a multifaceted state operation is the best choice. That probably leaves the Democrats with one of two people to consider if they followed this point of view, Gretchen Whitmer, the governor of Michigan, and Michelle Lujan Grisham, the governor of New Mexico. In shifting candidates and selecting a female it is undoubtedly unfair to pass by Camilla Harris. She has been the vice president for four years. However, if you're trying to seek votes from people who are avoiding voting for Joe Biden or a liberal ticket you probably do not want to take a former California senator and Joe Biden's current vice president. That may be unfair to Camilla Harris and her four years of duty as the vice president but if you're putting together a ticket on the basis of the most important facet to win the election, I believe there are a limited number of people who can move into that slot.

Thoughts

The Democrats have themselves in a difficult position. Interestingly it was a position that was seemingly apparent 4 years ago. General managers of athletic teams are constantly evaluating their players but also making estimates of will they want them as center pieces of their team four years later. It does seem that the politicians and our political parties lack that capacity. Joe Biden's difficulties in 2024 were easy to see in 2020. In the same manner it was clear that Donald Trump would be the same kind of person in 2024 he was in 2020. He would not even acknowledge that he lost the election in 2020 and the Democrats were going to have to run against that same person and his attempt to create an autocracy with him sitting on top in 2024. We are now there and the Democrats don't seem to have any plan in place. They must either act quickly to create a Democratic slate that can appeal across the country, including the independent and disgruntled Republicans, using Joe Biden or an select an alternative candidate who can step forth and campaign for 4 months.

Obadiah Plainman

Copies of all the previous copies of this blog are available at: thoughtscm.com

College Sports Discombobulated

Musings

I understand that the structure of college athletics is undergoing some major changes as a result of litigation that is underway and is being negotiated, perhaps in multiple courtrooms, but certainly in one case that goes by the name of House v NCAA. It is hard to understand the breadth of this lawsuit as it seems to have been the combination number of a number of pieces of litigation that were combined on the presumption that would make it easier to sort out the NCAA's problems in one pot. However I am not sure that has turned out to be the case. There seems to be a lot of discussion going on in this lawsuit with an endless number of attorneys all either getting paid to represent the NCAA or waiting to take a huge chunk of the final settlement. There is not much print media reporting on this litigation. Online there are some number of "experts" reporting on the case but they mostly seem to suggest that some potentially major things are moving along but nothing final is known.

The outcome has the potential to affect the athletic programs in all of colleges and universities in the NCAA and therefore in all the states and numerous communities. It is unclear why so much is going on and so little public knowledge exists.

Apparently there are approximately 1200 colleges and universities involved in one level or another of the NCAA's multi-tiered system. Of these institutions, most of which are public and some number are private, apparently only about 20 make money as we understand that phrase in the capitalist world. The Michigan, Ohio State, Texas and Alabamas' apparently make money because they have large stadiums and can make money in multiple sports besides all of the money they get from alumni and supporters. Effectively this means that all of these other schools lose money annually and get by supporting their athletic systems from alumni and supporters' contributions and student fees.

Contemplations

This structure has been questioned for a number of years under the claim that some number of these schools are getting paid a lot of money for promoting their student athletes and the athletes' performances. The protesters suggest that the student athletes should get some of that money. The trouble is that only a small number of athletes at a small number of schools can actually claim significant sums on that basis. This concept falls over into the NIL (name, image, likeness) rules that have been implemented recently and have seriously disrupted many of the sports. NIL payments allow individual athletes supporters to give those athletes payments in appreciation of the athletes. The objection is not to keep money away from students that perform at a significant level it is that as you apply money to a few players and you have a whole list of teammates and other team sports,you need to do something to figure out how you're going to spread the money amongst the teams and with regard to the various sports, and the funds should be spread equally amongst men's and women sports. Nothing was put into place by the NCAA to do that with the

NIL system. No one seemed to be looking at the big picture and long range consequences. Indeed NIL went into play with a so-called "portal" that allowed athletes to move from one school to another almost on their whim to the point where some students were at four different schools in a single year.

All of this silliness came into play in the last few years as the NCAA seemed to become more and more concerned with money and less and less concerned with the well-being of its student athletes. In response to the NCAA failure to act the students started acting and they and their attorneys were able to bring a number of pieces of litigation that are now in court proposing massive settlements to cure the NCAA's failure to act over the last decade. Over that period of time coaches salaries have gotten to be excessive, new programs were implemented to allow alumni to donate massive amounts of money to a school in return for some type of recognition or benefit and the money was then used under some type of supposed charitable program. For example I believe the University of Washington has taken large amounts of contributions and established a fund which pays offensive lineman $50,000 a year beyond their academic scholarship. This is all done in the name of charity. Somehow the IRS has not jumped in to stamp out this effort thus far but I would hope that is about to happen.

With all of this excess money and failure to set standards that recognized and protected the student athletes the door was open for the students and their attorneys to come after the NCAA. There is no sympathy for the NCAA. What is difficult is to understand how there is a settlement brewing in the House litigation which totals almost $3 billion, a large percentage of which will be paid out in the future from the various schools athletic budgets. Further, the NCAA seems to have admitted that, as proposed, this settlement would be the easiest to accept by the schools with large athletic bubgets that could produce larger pots of money and that the heaviest hit would go to the smaller schools with the smaller athletic budgets. This sounds like a typical program straight out of the politics of Washington DC.

The NCAA's program in this regard is headed up by a person by the name of Charlie Baker who used to be the governor of Massachusetts. He obviously is tangled up with a lot of money and his plan for schools that can't afford it to pay, and schools that had little or nothing to do with creating the current excessive system to be part of the settlement is incomprehensible. Maybe he should put out a clear explanation of what is under discussion.

As I look at this quagmire I am very confused. I don't understand how these various issues were combined together in a single lawsuit. I do not understand any of the limited information that has become available on the litigation. None of it seems to really give us a blueprint for long term college athletics in the United States. There is no information of how the system will protect or benefit student athletics. It looks like it is simply a settlement mixed together by two sides that were focused on the money and how the money could be contributed and paid rather than what the end result of the litigation should be for the long term benefit of college athletics.

Thoughts

In my state of great ignorance over this apparently abominable litigation I do not understand why the various smaller schools that cannot produce large sums of money on an annual basis, and that would include all of the division three, division two, and most of the division one schools and their conferences don't withdraw from this litigation and only agree to discuss a settlement they can fit within the bounds of what they might be able to pay without ruining their athletic programs and would be more commensurate with the level at which they may have exploited their student athletes. It is silly to pretend that Ohio University has exploited it's athletes with the purpose of making significant funds for the university at the same level or even in the same thought pattern as the Ohio State University. The obligation to pay should correlate to whatever harm is found at the schools and the system which evolves should be there to enhance, protect and provide for the future of college athletics not just fill a drum of money to be doled out mostly to attorneys with minimalist amounts to a few student athletes.

Silence Dogood

All previous posts of this blog can be seen at: thoughtscm.com

Befuddled and Perplexed

Musings

I have two unconnected thought patterns this week. They are incongruous but are occupying my thoughts at the same time. First, I am totally befuddled as to why we are bothering with a debate by 2 presidential candidates who have little appeal to the American public. They are going to have a staged debate with each other before either one has been nominated by his party. We already know what both of them stand for and their basic positions. It is just a contest of name calling to see if someone can get the final and better jab at the other person in a midsummer television production. It seems to have no purpose other than to satisfy the Washington politicians and the television networks that are looking for events to stage since they are struggling to sell advertising.

At the same time I am perplexed by what appears to me to be an ever increasing problem on our nations roads. With great regularity I find other drivers of motor vehicles and trucks racing to get where they're going and tailgating behind the person in front of them. It is as if they interpret they are  driving safely as long as they haven't hit the car in front of them. Keep right on top of them, as long as you don't hit them.  Go ahead and get every last inch of distance towards where you are going even if it won't get you there any faster. I'm perplexed.

Contemplations

First let us contemplate this needless debate scheduled for midsummer 2024. It is an election year and not being able to contemplate anything else in the world the news media is endlessly trying to come up with something to say about the presidential election this year. The trouble with commenting on the election is the incumbent president has been there for four years and indeed has been a Washington politician since the early 70s. Thus he has been around talking to us politically for 50 years. We pretty much know what he says  and how he acts. The other party to the debate has already been president once and, according to the experts that nominate people for such categories, Donnie is listed  the worst president we ever had. That seems to be repeated and understood by a large portion of the population except  for the people that seem to like Mr. Donald no matter what he says or does, apparently as an extension of the mediocre TV show in which he starred as himself firing people from their jobs.

The debaters have an entourage of political advisors who have been feeding them the same positions and information now for a number of years and they are simply going to repeat that and try to get digs at each other during the debate. It is hard to understand why this has any purpose. It is like rerunning an old soap opera that has already been on TV for a decade or more. In this case multiple decades. However it is scheduled and  I don't have anything else to say about the debate except that I doubt it's worth watching, I won't watch it and I wish our political parties could come up with something better than this pair of candidates for us to choose between. This shows the decrepitness of the two parties and the need for a third party.

I don't drive an excessive amount. I do most of my driving in a metropolitan area and a lot of it is in residential portions of that city. Periodically I am on the interstate to go a distance over 10 miles. What I am perplexed by is the driving habits that seemed to prevail on the roads today. What befuddles me is drivers speeding to get wherever they are going, as fast as they can, regardless of the traffic. Worse, that pattern of driving seems to be increasing. The speeding and tailgating seems to be getting worse and worse. In the last couple weeks I've had the cars behind me: swerve to avoid hitting me when I stopped for a pedestrian, pull over into the middle of the road when there were only two lanes and speed away to try and not only get ahead of me but to beat the car coming from the other direction, pull over on the shoulder to try and get by my car so they could zoom ahead. In each of these instances I was driving at approximately the speed limit. However, if you're going 25 miles an hour in a 25 mile an hour zone people seem to think they should be going 35 or more so they can get somewhere faster.

This pattern of driving puts them right on the back of my car, tailgating if you will, and putting me and them in a position to have an accident if anything should cause me to slow down.

 It can actually be humorous as these cars finally pass you because they love to shout at you and or flip you the bird to note that you're going too slow because you're not speeding. As I watch these drivers behavior they don't seem to pay any attention to how fast they would get actually get somewhere. For example if I am going to speed limit and there is a red light ahead but I have left some amount of distance between myself and the car in front of me they will pull around to get in front of me to get right behind that car and come to a stop at the red light as I pull up to beside them to wave at them. They ignore whether or not they are going anywhere by closing down that distance to the car in front of them where there is a red light in front of them. They seem to simply have a need to make sure there is no distance left between them and the car in front of them or the light in front of them. It is a pattern of driving made for accidents.

Thoughts

On these two disparate topics I have simple thoughts.

We should not be having the debate. It's probably too late to cancel it. I hope they cancel the next debate later in the fall. It has little or no potential to be meaningful. Our political parties and this campaign are at their worst with this year's effort. We have always complained that the elections are too long and here we are staging a debate before either party has even nominated a candidate! This really is senseless.

I doubt anyone will start driving slower and leave more space between themselves and the car in front but I would hope that at least a few people will stop and think that their effort to run right up on  to the tailgate in front of them, or up to the red light, really accomplishes nothing and at some point in time can actually lead to an accident. I will just have to keep having that wish and hoping a little bit of it comes true.

Silence Dogood

All copies of this blog which have been posted are available at:  thoughtscm.com

Biden's Continuing Misguided Effort to Preside Over the Ukraine War

Musings

In recent days we have heard a number of comments regarding the Biden administration's loosening of its controls over the weapons the US has forwarded to Ukraine to defend itself. Except for a few minor limitations it is hard to understand why there are any controls placed on the weapons we send to Ukraine. Ukraine is fighting a war to defend itself from extinction. Russia invaded Ukraine. Russia is the largest country in the world with the largest supply of natural resources in the world. It has four times as many people as Ukraine and yet, Ukraine has withstood the Russian onslaught for 2 1/2 years. That in itself is amazing.

The United States has been one of the main suppliers of Ukraine with weapons to defend itself. However, the United States has placed a number of restrictions on the weapons we have sent. Indeed, we prohibited Ukraine from shooting any of the American munitions into Russia. That creates the interesting war scenario where Ukraine is supposed to just sit there and defend itself while Russia does whatever it wants to prepare assaults, bombard any portion of the Ukraine that desires, make various assaults into the Ukrainian territory, and the Ukraine is not allowed to respond until Russian assaults hit the Ukrainian border. That is a mind boggling way to fight a war. With all the brainpower assembled inside the Beltway in Washington DC it is hard to understand how the Biden administration has decided that this is a good policy.

There has been a more recent loosening of those controls but they are still in place so that missiles that are sent to Ukraine can only go a limited distance and not reach Russian supply bases and infrastructure. In addition, we now learn that the Biden administration has put a number of constraints on the more recent arms supplies it sent so that this weaponry can only be used in certain places and with certain approvals. Mind boggling.

Contemplations

The Biden reasoning for all of these controls is that they don't want the war to escalate! We have been through this approach many times and it has always failed. It is unclear why politicians in Washington DC always decide that they have a better way to handle ground level military decisions halfway around the world than the people actually involved in the fighting. It must be part of the ego boost that comes with getting elected to such positions and/ or being part of the entourage that follows the leadership around. They develop a self importance and think that they are in a much better place to handle these issues than anyone else.

To my recollection all the times our politicians in Washington dictated strategy have been failures. Evan if we go back and look at Roosevelt, and Churchill from his perch in England, in World

War II we find that each of them offered a number of poor strategies and actions which interfered with the military efforts to defeat the enemy.

If we fast forward a little bit to Korea we find the Truman administration sending confusing directives to the battlefront for approximately 3 years. Next we get to the Vietnam era where we had Lyndon Johnson his secretary of war Robert McNamara and then Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger actually directing the war in Vietnam day by day from their offices in Washington DC. Somehow they felt that looking at maps and reports that came back from Vietnam made them in a much better position to move forces around and dictate how they would act than were the admirals and generals in the field whom they had placed there to command the troops and their actions in Vietnam. That entire episode was an absolute disaster. Perhaps Joe Biden has not read any histories of that debacle or perhaps he has forgotten that he lived through it.

Our record in the several Middle Eastern wars and all of the endless political direction that came out of various administrations in Washington to direct the fighting in Iraq, Afghanistan, Jordan and Syria and other areas of Middle East were consistent failures. We again find directives from the political administrations which did nothing too achieve concrete goals, nor allow the troops in the field to produce a desired result.

In theory we have learned this lesson many times. It is hard to understand why we are hampering Ukraine by once again placing political constraints on the use of our weapons.

Thoughts

This does not seem to be a difficult issue. There may be a few constraints that are appropriate to put on the use of our weapons in fighting Russia. For example, the Ukrainians should not try and blow up the Kremlin. They should not try to blow up civilian targets. Such basics are simple. However, the Russian rail network, utility infrastructure, military staging dumps, oil and gas systems and any number of other targets in Russia that provide the underlying support for the Russian military should be fair targets for the Ukrainians. The political brain trust inside the Beltway in Washington DC should cease dictating war strategy and work on trying to get the proper support to the Ukrainian military.

Obadiah Plainman

Copies of all previous postings of this blog can be found at: thoughtscm.com

Politicians and University Administrators Unmask Outside Agitators!

Musings

Our vigilant mayors and university administrators have found a new reason to explain their endless missteps and failures of leadership with regard to the demonstrations on college and university campuses. They have discovered outside agitators amongst the crowd! I'm sure they looked long and hard to find the people from outside the student body to add to those whom they blame for everything, of course excepting themselves.

What a surprise to discover that faculty members are not only supporting the students but that people in the neighborhood are coming to support them and bringing them food and supplies and people that work in the neighborhood are bringing food and supplies and others that are curious or just agree with the demonstrators cause are coming to show their support. Now that is really unusual in the history of human behavior that these people might show up and offer such comfort or assistance and it's important for the powers that be to find these agitators because that gives them someone else to blame.

It appears that amongst our agitators is a 63 year old lady in New York City who supports the student assembly on campus and went to show that support. She was taken away by the police for her dastardly actions, as were various residential neighbors and people working in the neighborhood that linked arms to try and help shield the students on the campus. There seems to have been little evidence of disturbance or civil disobedience and indeed many of the students of Jewish ethnicity we're still present and intermixed with the pro Palestinian students, all of whom were trying to assert their rights to assembly and free speech and have their campus for themselves and not a police proving ground.

Contemplations

One of the interesting features of this endless coverage is that the news media is constantly reminding us of an uptick in anti-Semitism and that students of Jewish ethnicity complain they don't feel safe. Occasionally there is a comment that there are also counter demonstrations by the pro-Israeli students who also have signs and chants and intimidate pro-Palestinian students. Unfortunately there are also occasions such as on the UCLA campus where the two groups decided to have an altercation with each other. As with most things each of these issues goes both ways. It does appear that the politicians are much more worried about a Jewish vote than a Palestinian vote  (I'm trying not to be too cynical about why the politicians are jumping in). This is even true from the White House where it has been announced that the president is making a speech about anti-Semitism this coming week. I'm surprised the speech is not about anti-Semitism and anti-Islamism. You would think the two go  together at this point. I'm sure he'll throw a sentence or two to remind us, "oh yes be nice to Islamic people too"  as he wants to gather all of the votes he can from every group available, even as he shows a distinct backing and favoritism from the White House for the Israeli position, none of which has been justified with regard to the destruction of Gaza, where over 35,000 Palestinians have been killed, of which over 20,000 are children. But, now that we have identified some outside agitators to justify these reactionary positions by the politicians and the university and college administrations, those in power can pound there chests are keep charging forward.

As we contemplate the need the politicians and university administrators felt to respond to the outside agitators let us consider some number of the outside agitators which have been prevalent in our nation's history to clarify why it is necessary to stop them before they cause too much agitation. There were the abolitionists campaigning to take other people's property (slaves) and free them, there were the suffragettes who wanted the right to vote, there were the labor unions that wanted decent working conditions, there were the African Americans who wanted to end Jim Crow and be equal citizens, there were the farm workers who wanted to get paid and have decent working conditions and amongst these remember that we have our most insistent outside agitators who were constantly arrested for being so evil, people such as Martin Luther king and Cesar Chavez.

That's an abbreviated list of some of the terrible outside agitators from our history. And to think that now we have more citizens that are involved in agitating and assembling for free speech and other rights they claim under the constitution.

To finish today's list of totally outrageous outside agitators we have uncovered ( it was slick detective work, it was in the newspaper) another one. Jerry Seinfeld is reported to have helped to bankroll a counter protest by pro-Israeli UCLA students at that campus. Here we have an outside agitator from New York who has come to Los Angeles and given money to support one of the groups of protesters on campus. I'm sure Mayor Adams back in New York City is appalled as the UCLA administration must be. But then doesn't Jerry have his right to free speech (agitation even)  as all the rest of the protesters on both sides who want to assemble and emphasize their citizens rights  ?

Thoughts

This endless episode of sound and fury continues because of a gross  lack of leadership on the college and university campuses and their adjacent municipal governments. Of course, whenever there's an issue with public attention to be had the politicians show up for screen time and short meaningless diatribes and now we have various politicians jumping in the pot to try and get their  time, particularly because it's an election year. It's sad to think that this lack of leadership could spread so far, to so many of our political and academic institutions. These politicians and school administrators need to stand  in front of a mirror to contemplate what they have done, how their attempted leadership failed, the misplaced judgment that was exercised in their decisions and rethink what they should be doing instead of  just exercising more John Wayne bravado.

Silence Dogood