Monthly Archives: July 2019

Sanctions on Turkey?

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That’s the question being asked regarding Turkey’s decision to buy—and subsequently to take delivery on—Russia’s AS-400 anti-aircraft missile system and the impact that has, or should have, on our alliance with Turkey.

The question, though, assumes we have an alliance. Formally, one exists, but it’s in name only outside of NATO (and with Turkey cozying up to Russia, that one is in flux, too); Turkey has chosen functionally to walk away from any bilateral arrangement.

I think, though, the decision to cancel Turkey’s F-35 buy is sufficient. We don’t need to apply sanctions; we don’t need to have much of anything to do with Turkey, good or bad, outside our NATO obligations.

Turkey just isn’t that important to us.  It’s a convenient path into the Middle East, but even that is questionable.  Turkey, after all, refused to let us operate from there during the second invasion of Iraq, in contrast with Saudi Arabia’s and Kuwait’s active support.  That refusal complicated military matters and led to a longer fight than necessary, with higher casualties all around.

Campaign Fund Raising

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It seems the RNC raised a ton more money in June than did the DNC.

The Democratic National Committee raised $8.5 million in June, the month of the party’s presidential debates in Miami—less than half of the $20.7 million the Republican National Committee pulled in during that time period, new disclosures show.

I’d be cautious about reading much into that, though.  For one thing, it’s a one-month snapshot, and the fund-raising season will last into the fall of 2020 (I suspect money raised after September won’t mean much).

More importantly, though, the situations between parties are different at this point in the campaign.  Progressive-Democrats are spreading their campaign donations among the DNC and forty-leven Presidential candidates.  Republicans, on the other hand, are more concentrated: the RNC and one candidate.

A more telling statistic is accumulated cash on hand:

The DNC…finished the month with $9.3 million cash on hand. The RNC is meanwhile building a larger war chest during the lead-up to 2020 and had $43.5 million cash on hand at the end of the month.

However, this also is subject to the caveat about the number of candidates also collecting party-favoring donations.

It’d be more instructive to see the numbers for all the candidates and national committees aggregated by party.

Nationalism

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In his Wall Street Journal piece on this, Christopher DeMuth (Hudson Institute Distinguished Fellow) had this:

the nationalist claim is…government has abdicated basic responsibilities…:

failed to secure national borders and provide regular procedures for immigration and assimilation.

delegated lawmaking to foreign and international bodies, and domestic bureaucracies…

…acquiesced in, or actively promoted, the splintering of the nation into contending racial, religious and other groups and has favored some at the expense of others.

On the contrary, these aren’t abdications. The first two are by Progressive-Democrat design. The third is a deliberately wielded tool of the Progressive-Democrats to achieve the first two.

One has only to hear the bigoted spew of Ocasio-Cortez, Tlaib, Pressley, Omar to understand this. One has only to see the Progressive-Democratic Party Presidential candidates, almost to a man, favor decriminalizing illegal entry into our nation, and then giving illegal aliens free health care at our expense. One has only to see the Progressive-Democrat Congressmen do their best to block funding for supporting our borders.

The American Heritage Dictionary defines nationalism as

The belief that nations will benefit from acting independently rather than collectively, emphasizing national rather than international goals.
The belief that a particular cultural or ethnic group constitutes a distinct people deserving of political self-determination.

There are no downsides to nationalism.

Guns and Homicides

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According to The Fresno Bee:

More people are licensed to carry concealed weapons in Fresno County than any other county in California, according to data from the Fresno County Sheriff’s Office and the Fresno Police Department [17,400 licenses for a population of 994,000].

And

Orange County is next with 12,008 licenses [population 3.2 million].

And

Los Angeles County, with a population of more than 10 million, had only 424 permits as of last summer….

And

San Diego County [population 3.3 million] had fewer than 1,150, and Alameda County [population 1.7 million] had 186. The fewest licenses were reported in San Francisco County [population 883,000], where the state bureau reported that there were only two CCW licenses….

On the other hand, here are the homicide rates (2018 figures) for those counties:

Fresno County: 5.3 per 100,000

Orange County: 1.5 per 100,000

Los Angeles County: 5.5 per 100,000

San Diego County: 2.5 per 100,000

Alameda County: 5.5 per 100,000

San Francisco County: 5.3 per 100,000

High legal gun ownership doesn’t seem correlated at all with high homicide rates.  Quite the opposite: the trend is fewer killings as gun ownership increases.

Testing

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Boeing is going to be unable to return its 737MAX to commercial flight before 2020; the current latest guess is January, and that’s likely to slip.

Fixing the Boeing Co 737 MAX’s hazardous flight-control software and completing other steps to start carrying passengers is likely to stretch into 2020, an increasing number of government and industry officials say, even as the company strives to get its jet back into service still this year.
The situation remains fluid, no firm timeline has been established and Boeing still has to satisfy US regulators that it has answered all outstanding safety questions.
…
Boeing executives, FAA engineers, and international aviation regulators have steadily expanded their safety analyses to cover a growing list of issues spanning everything from emergency recovery procedures to potentially suspect electronic components.

That pretty much says it all.  Boeing needs to stop taking short cuts—legitimate as those might seem, and are in a variety of cases—and test this aircraft from the ground up as though every component in the control system were newly developed and never before tested.  “Every,” here, means physical components, electronic components, and software.  And pilots: their understanding of and interaction with the control systems, and with their training and operating manuals, needs to be evaluated de novo, also, as the Ethiopian crash suggests.

Too much of this stuff have not interacted with each other before in this particular aircraft, and even those components of subsystems and those subsystems themselves that have interacted within themselves have not, necessarily, interacted with other components and subsystems.

It would, in fact, be a good idea to do this from-the-ground-up retesting as a matter of routine whenever there’s a major software or hardware update to the aircraft.  Those updates create a nearly new aircraft, and accumulating changes in performance, however subtle or seemingly minor, can falsify a number of underlying assumptions and add up to large failures.

In the present case, the bit-by-bit testing is not saving much money, either.