From the Rick Mercer Report.
January 26, 2010
January 20, 2010
This has got to be a mis-communication
At least, I hope it’s just a miscommunication:
Food handouts were shut off Tuesday to thousands of people at a tent city here when the main U.S. aid agency said the Army should not be distributing the packages.
It was not known whether the action reflected a high-level policy decision at the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) or confusion in a city where dozens of entities are involved in aid efforts.
“We are not supposed to get rations unless approved by AID,” Maj. Larry Jordan said.
Jordan said that approval was revoked; water was not included in the USAID decision, so the troops continued to hand out bottles of water. The State Department and USAID did not respond to requests for comment.
Surely not even the most pig-headed rules-lawyer would have required this . . . I hope.
H/T Castle Argghhh.
Update, 21 January: For reasons of incompetence, I forgot to actually include the URL in that link to Castle Argghhh. Fixed now.
While I’m updating the post, this may be relevant:
The MRE (Meals Ready to Eat, in a pouch) are frequently used as emergency rations. The MRE has evolved from its initial introduction in 1983 (12 separate entrees) to today (24 menu entrees). The MREs change from year to year, and new entrees are added in place of others. The U.S. military has generally switched out entrees each year (apparently the notion that such a deal is a zero-sum game seems to persist, as opposed to just adding new ones). This constant evolution has done much to diminish the bad reputations MREs had early on. Back then, the MRE (officially, “Meals, Ready to Eat”) was often called “Meals Rejected by Everyone”.
The United States also has other rations, including variants for cold weather (which has a higher calorie count than the regular MRE – 1540 per meal compared to 1250 for an MRE), and a kosher/halal variant for Jewish and Moslem soldiers (both religions, for instance, forbid the consumption of pork). Vegetarian entrees are provided, as well. The United States also has developed the Humanitarian Daily Ration (HDR), which has three meals and is based on vegetarian entrees to provide a low chance of offending cultural sensibilities. Many of these HDRs were dropped over Afghanistan in late 2001. Several hundred thousand HDRs are stockpiled for disaster relief, and production can be ramped up quickly. MREs and HDRs are particularly attractive because they provide uncontaminated food that does not require refrigeration, in a compact package. The UN, and many other food aid organizations, use the HDR for situations like Haiti.
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January 13, 2010
Toronto bureaucrats and politicians at odds over pond skating
After yesterday’s article at the National Post, Peter Kuitenbrouwer finds that the new “no skating” policy was implemented without informing the elected politicians:
Toronto parks department bureaucrats permanently banned all skating on city ponds without consulting any elected city officials, Councillor Paula Fletcher, the parks chief, said yesterday.
Ms. Fletcher (Toronto-Danforth) and the committee’s vice-chair, Karen Stintz (Eglinton-Lawrence), believe the ban on pond skating is wrong, and plan to bring the topic to the Parks and Environment meeting at City Hall this morning. Ms. Fletcher suggested yesterday people should continue ignoring the signs, as long as they believe the ice is safe.
“I believe that there should be skating on ponds,” Ms. Fletcher said yesterday.
“It certainly was not a public policy,” she added, to ban skating on city ponds. The councillor said she was unaware of a document, “Activities on Frozen Open Bodies of Water Policy,” until I reported on it in the National Post yesterday.
“When this is a public debate it should be a public document,” added Ms. Fletcher.
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January 12, 2010
“You should not obey every sign you see”
I’m not even a skater, but I thoroughly agree with Rob Roberts Peter Kuitenbrouwer on this:
Toronto’s biggest skating rink is now (unofficially) open for your winter pleasure.
Please ignore the City of Toronto’s yellow plastic signs, fastened to trees and posts around Grenadier Pond in High Park, which read, “Danger. Ice unsafe. Keep off. Municipal Code #608.”
The affirmation on these signs is false, as hundreds proved this past weekend when we piled onto the city’s largest pond. Some cross-country skied. Some walked dogs. A photographer from a community newspaper got on to take pictures. One young man who had a thick Russian accent brought an ice drill and bored eight holes (the ice is about 25 cm thick) and sat down on his cooler to fish.
Mostly, we skated: people shoveled off five beautiful hockey rinks along the 1.2 km-long expanse of ice, linked by ice lanes. Shinny was never so glorious. Yesterday I skated again, joined once more by skaters, skiers and walkers.
Flaunting the municipal signs doesn’t bother me; I explained to my son (who is seven) that, “you should not obey every sign you see.”
Update: Corrected attribution to the actual author of the piece. I must say that the National Post author attributions are sometimes rather confusing. The page currently says the piece is by Rob Roberts, but elsewhere on the site, Chris Selley refers to it as Peter Kuitenbrouwer’s article. Selley also perfectly encapsulates the municipal government’s preferences: “Just do what the government says and no one gets hurt”.
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January 9, 2010
QotD: The awfulness of airports
Over the weekend, an idiot walked the wrong way through a secure exit for arriving passengers at Newark airport. An entire terminal was shut down so that everybody on the “sterile” side of the security barriers could be herded back out and rescreened. The entire process took just under seven hours. The cascading delays disrupted air travel worldwide. They didn’t even catch the doofus who caused the ruckus. No doubt, if they’d announced his location over the paging system, he’d have been drawn and quartered by a mob of traveling salesmen from 3M and a gaggle of middle-school girls returning from a volleyball tournament.
Now, I should back up. When I referred to the “sterile” side of the security barrier, I was using the term narrowly, to refer to folks who’d been through the metal detectors. Because to use the word “sterile” in its usual context in a sentence with “airports” — those belching Petri dishes of bathroom effluence and unidentifiable noisome miasma — would be a grotesque abrogation of journalistic trust.
According to the latest epidemiological research, airports reside somewhere between no-frills Haitian brothels and Penn State fraternity bathrooms when it comes to hygiene. USA Today recently surveyed the health-inspection records of airport restaurants and found that serious code violations were as commonplace as rat and mouse droppings; 77 percent of 35 restaurants reviewed at Reagan National Airport had at least one major violation.
I could go on, of course. The petty humiliations, the routine deceptions from airline employees desperate to rid themselves of troublesome travelers (“Oh, they can definitely help you at the gate!”), the stress-position seats, the ever-changing rules for what can and cannot be in your carry-on, being charged for food that the Red Cross would condemn if it were served at Gitmo: Air travel is the most expensive unpleasant experience in everyday life outside the realm of words ending in -oscopy.
Jonah Goldberg, “A No-Fly List? Count Me In: Flying before 9/11 was already awful, and it has only become worse”, National Review, 2010-01-08
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January 4, 2010
Ohio moves to protect wine drinkers from themselves
Ah, those Ohio wine drinkers . . . they must be consuming wine at much higher than the national average. How else can you account for the state government legally imposing limits on how much wine you can buy each year?
As laws go, Ohio’s limit on wine purchases appears to be simple:
“No family household shall purchase more than 24 cases of 12 bottles of 750 milliliters of wine in one year.”
That’s 288 bottles per year — plenty for most people. But it raises questions if you’re a collector, entertain a lot or just prickle at the thought of another government regulation.
How do they know how much wine I buy? Why do they care? How many cases have I purchased this year?
Of course, the limit isn’t really a limit: there’s no mechanism to track your actual purchases from retailers, Ohio drinkers, it’s only to limit sales direct from wineries to consumers. This limit was introduced after the US Supreme Court decision a few years back which struck down state-level restrictions on shipments from out-of-state wineries.
In several ways, it’s a typical bureaucratic response to a non-issue, providing work for several new civil servants, requiring uncompensated form-filling and legal compliance on the part of the sellers (over and above the normal requirements for selling alcohol), and being remarkably ineffective, to boot:
All wineries or importers for wineries that produce fewer than 250,000 gallons per year pay the state $25 for a license that allows them to ship directly to customers here. They have to pay the state’s alcohol and sales taxes. They also have to tell the state who received the wine — and how much that person got.
The Ohio Division of Liquor Control, which receives the reports on wine sales from the S permit holders, uses the reports to determine whether someone might be violating the purchase limit, said Matt Mullins, a spokesman for the division. “It’s the division’s interpretation that it’s related to the amount of wine shipped from an S permit holder. That’s what we believe the intent (of the law) was.”
The reports are due each year in March, he said, and the first came last year. No one was flagged as a violator.
If the reports did show that someone had purchased too much wine by mail, Mullins said, the information would be turned over to the Ohio Department of Public Safety Investigative Unit, which enforces state alcohol laws. The law allows a fine of up to $100 if someone is found guilty.
I’m not at all in favour of this sort of legalistic bullshit, but if they’re going to go to the effort of setting up this system, it’s farcical to — a year or more after the fact — track down a “perpetrator” and then fine them “up to $100”. A hundred bucks wouldn’t pay the state for the time and effort to track down that criminal mastermind who legally ordered an extra case of wine . . .
Of course, the statist’s response would be to substantially increase the fines, rather than dismantle the whole ridiculous tracking system.
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January 2, 2010
December 31, 2009
“We put the jerk in knee-jerk with the way we respond to threats”
Tom Kelley sent me a link to this Miles O’Brien article:
[. . .] my family and I will face long lines, lots of questions, pat down searches and an hour of lockdown time in our seats before landing. It is as if my ruler-brandishing first-grade teacher Sister Grace took over Delta Air Lines. “Books away — feet on the floor — hands on your desk — eyes straight ahead . . . ”
It is brilliant thinking like the new seat arrest rule that should tell you a lot about our ill-conceived approach to thwarting terrorists who continue to find plane loads full of innocent Americans to be tempting targets. I don’t suppose future terrorists might try to light some portion of their clothing 61 minutes before landing do you?
What about the baby who needs a bottle or a passy on descent and is crying his lungs out? God help him, his mother and the rest of us . . .
We put the jerk in knee-jerk with the way we respond to threats.
Our Homeland Security Czarina Janet Napolitano tried to spin the whole thing into a triumph of our security apparatus. At least she didn’t get a “Nappy, you’re doin’ a heckuva a job!” from our Commander-in-Chief
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Government moves quickly on TSA . . . to silence critics
In a bold move in the wake of the latest terrorist bomb attempt, the government has pounced . . . on the bloggers who reported on the TSA’s response:
As the government reviews how an alleged terrorist was able to bring a bomb onto a U.S.-bound plane and try to blow it up on Christmas Day, the Transportation Security Administration is going after bloggers who wrote about a directive to increase security after the incident.
TSA special agents served subpoenas to travel bloggers Steve Frischling and Chris Elliott, demanding that they reveal who leaked the security directive to them. The government says the directive was not supposed to be disclosed to the public.
Frischling said he met with two TSA special agents Tuesday night at his Connecticut home for about three hours and again on Wednesday morning when he was forced to hand over his lap top computer. Frischling said the agents threatened to interfere with his contract to write a blog for KLM Royal Dutch Airlines if he didn’t cooperate and provide the name of the person who leaked the memo.
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December 30, 2009
If the terrorists don’t kill off the airlines, the TSA will
Radley Balko joins the chorus of protests about the latest set of how-stupid-can-you-get “security” rules from the TSA:
Seems to me that what this, Flight 93, and the Richard Reid incident have shown us is that the best line of defense against airplane-based terrorism is us. Alert, aware, informed passengers.
TSA, on the other hand, equates hassle with safety. For all the crap they put us through, this guy still got some sort of explosive material on the plane from Amsterdam. He was stopped by law-abiding passengers. So TSA responds to all of this by . . . announcing plans to hassle law-abiding U.S. passengers even more.
If you’re really cynical, you could make a good argument that they’re really only interested in the appearance of safety. They’ve simply concluded that the more difficult they make your flight, the safer you’ll feel. Never mind if any of the theatrics actually work.
After my last business flight (the day of the Shoe Bomber’s transatlantic aircraft attempt), I’ve actively avoided commercial air travel. This latest set of Security Theatre set dressings merely extends the range I’ll be willing to drive rather than putting up with the flight — actually, the flight preparation, rather than the flight itself.
Update: Don’t know why I thought it was the Shoe Bomber . . . it was the would-be liquid bomb conspiracy that happened while I was in transit through Atlanta.
December 29, 2009
Air security gone insane
Hard to disagree with Gulliver on this one:
In the wake of Friday’s attempted bombing of a Northwest Airlines flight from Amsterdam to Detroit, the people who run America’s airport security apparatus appear to have gone insane. Despite statements from several officials, including Janet Napolitano, the secretary of homeland security, that there is “no indication” of any broader plot against American airliners, some truly absurd security “precautions” are being implemented on US-bound flights worldwide.
The most ridiculous new rule prohibits passengers on US-bound international flights from leaving their seats or having anything on their laps—even a laptop or a pillow—during the final hour of flight. You’re probably thinking “Wait, what?” Indeed. The New York Times elaborates:
In effect, the restrictions mean that passengers on flights of 90 minutes or less would most likely not be able to leave their seats at all, since airlines do not allow passengers to walk around the cabin while a plane is climbing to its cruising altitude.
Gulliver looks forward to the barrage of lawsuits from the first people who are forced to use the bathroom in their airplane seats. This is the absolute worst sort of security theatre: inconvenient, absurd, and, crucially, ineffective.
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December 22, 2009
December 18, 2009
The lesson is . . . next time, don’t turn it in
Remember the report of a man who’d found a shotgun on his lawn, turned it in to the police, and was promptly charged with posession of an illegal weapon? Well, he’s been convicted and will face up toa minimum of five years in prison for his “crime”:
A former soldier who handed a discarded shotgun in to police faces at least five years imprisonment for “doing his duty”.
Paul Clarke, 27, was found guilty of possessing a firearm at Guildford Crown Court on Tuesday — after finding the gun and handing it personally to police officers on March 20 this year.
The jury took 20 minutes to make its conviction, and Mr Clarke now faces a minimum of five year’s imprisonment for handing in the weapon.
In a statement read out in court, Mr Clarke said: “I didn’t think for one moment I would be arrested.
“I thought it was my duty to hand it in and get it off the streets.”
The way the law is written, the jury would have had no choice but to find him guilty. If only there were some way for a jury to find that the law was at fault. (Or, among their other limits to civil liberties, has the British government made jury nullification illegal?)
Update: Fixed the mis-statement about the length of sentence Mr. Clarke may face.
December 16, 2009
Hiding . . . everything
David Harsanyi explains why federally funded researchers don’t have the same expectation of privacy that privately funded workers do:
In this country, even a global warming denialist with a carbon fetish and bad intentions has the right to see the inner workings of government.
Or at least he should.
When leaked e-mails recently exposed talk of manipulating scientific evidence on global warming, Kevin Trenberth, head of the climate analysis section at the National Center for Atmospheric Research, argued that skeptics, and other evil-doers, had cherry-picked and presented his comments out of context.
To rectify this injustice, I sent Trenberth (and NCAR) a Freedom of Information request asking for his e-mail correspondences with other renowned climate scientists in an effort to help contextualize what they’ve been talking about.
Surely the tragically uninformed among us could use some perspective on innocuous Trenberth comments like “we can’t account for the lack of warming at the moment and it is a travesty that we can’t” or “we are [nowhere] close to knowing where energy is going or whether clouds are changing to make the planet brighter.”
So, of course, the federally funded organization snapped right to getting the information they were legally required to provide, right? Perhaps in some other parallel universe, but not in this one:
Well, soon after the request was fired off, I was informed by NCAR’s counsel that the organization was, in fact, not a federal agency — since its budget is laundered through the National Science Foundation — thus it is under no obligation to provide information to the public.
“Why don’t you put all your emails online for everyone to see,” Trenberth helpfully suggested to me. “My email is none of your business.”
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December 15, 2009
RAF and Royal Navy facing further cuts
With the costs of maintaining British troops in Afghanistan still rising, the government is expected to announce further cuts to the Royal Air Force and Royal Navy today:
Some RAF bases face closure to pay for extra equipment for British forces in Afghanistan, a defence minister indicated this morning.
Quentin Davies said that it would be a “very good thing” to get by with fewer RAF bases if that was possible and that the Ministry of Defence wanted to spend its money with “maximum effect”.
[. . .]
Some Tornado and Harrier aircraft and small navy surface vessels are likely to face cuts. A number of RAF bases will be closed — including reportedly RAF Kinloss in Moray — and part of the sovereign base areas in Cyprus will be sold.
The two large aircraft carriers are expected to survive this particular cut, although it wouldn’t be surprising to see further delay introduced into their construction . . . even though stretching out delivery dates is an expensive way to increase short-term savings:
The announcement follows the publication of a report from the National Audit Office saying the gap between the cost of planned weapons projects and what the MoD can actually afford could be as much as £36bn.
The gap would have been larger had the ministry not delayed a number of projects, such as the construction of two large aircraft carriers, the Queen Elizabeth and the Prince of Wales, the NAO reports.
However, the decision to delay the carrier project to save £450m over the next four years will increase costs by £1.12bn over later years — a net increase of £674m, the NAO says.
The MoD has also decided to reduce an order of Lynx Wildcats from 80 to 62 helicopters, saving £194m but reducing planned flying hours by a third. The report says that last year the price for the 15 biggest military schemes rose by £1.2bn, £733m of which was the result of delays designed to save money in the short term.
Update: Believe it or not, there’s actually some sense to the government’s announced changes:
The headlining move comes with the announcement, widely anticipated, that the British fleet of US-made Chinook heavy-lift helicopters is to increase from 48 to 70 aircraft, with initial deliveries of ten new choppers arriving by 2013. The Chinook is the only helicopter in widespread Western service with enough spare lift to operate with any freedom in Afghanistan’s heat and high altitudes, and the new copters will be extremely welcome among British forces there.
It is also expected that another Boeing C-17 heavy transport plane will be ordered to join the existing UK fleet of 5, which are regarded as crucial to sustaining the “air bridge” logistic link between Blighty and its troops in Afghanistan.
These short-term improvements will be paid for not by any budget increase, but by reducing the active forces of Tornado bombers and Harrier close-support jets, and early retirement for much of the existing fleet of antique Nimrod MR2 maritime patrol aircraft. These moves will allow closure or mothballing of some of the RAF’s 45+ UK stations, with associated further job losses and savings.
They’ve also announced the retirement of the Sea King helicopter from active service, with the existing inventory of Merlin HC3 moving from the RAF to RN service (including whatever refitting will be necessary to “maricise” them for full-time service with the fleet).
Overall, the changes make a good deal of sense . . . what a surprise.
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