A Plebe's Site

Quam bene vivas referre, non quam diu.

Feckless

Posted on 24 April 2014 by eehines

I was going to title this post “Feckless Foreign Policy,” but I hesitate to call this administration’s…something…”policy;” although, it certainly is foreign to good sense.

Our CNO, Admiral Jonathan Greenert, answered a question back in February from a Philippine journalist (it’s only just coming to light in the US—so much for a pivot in the general direction of Asia) concerning a hypothetical, an event in which the People’s Republic of China seized Philippine territory in the Spratly Islands in the South China Sea.

Of course we would help you. … I don’t know what that help would be specifically. I mean, we have an obligation because we have a treaty. But I don’t know in what capacity that help is.

I don’t know what’s more worrisome—that our CNO would have this tenuous a grasp, or that he was speaking his Commander-in-Chief’s words.

Paying the Vig

Posted on 24 April 2014 by eehines

New York’s Metropolitan Transit Authority has reached an agreement with the Transport Workers Union Local 100, the union representing the city’s 34,000 subway and bus employees. No news there. What’s interesting is a “side letter,” also agreed, about which both the MTA and the TWU carefully kept quiet.

A side letter of this sort is a separate deal that commits to paper the wink and nod that otherwise would represent an unspoken agreement that no one is supposed to know about, but that the winker and winkee reached on the q.t.

This particular side letter has the MTA paying, over the next three years, $6 million into a union slush fund “trust established for permissible purposes.”

The payments are being made “in the interests of sound labor relations.”

Of course.

TANSTAAFL

2 + 2 must always = 4
–Polish proverb

Be not intimidated… nor suffer yourselves to be wheedled out of your liberties by any pretense of politeness, delicacy, or decency. These, as they are often used, are but three different names for hypocrisy, chicanery and cowardice.
–John Adams

Nothing in the universe has a shorter half-life than a politician’s memory for inconvenient facts.
–Admiral Hamish Alexander, RMN

Dawn is nature’s way of telling you to go to bed.
And to just stay there until the evil yellow disk is gone again.
–Anonymous

In a polity, each citizen is to possess his own arms, which are not supplied or owned by the state.
–Aristotle

The way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race.
–Chief Justice John Roberts.

A yawn is a silent scream for coffee.
–Shane Mclean

If I had eight hours to chop down a tree, I’d spend six hours sharpening my ax.
–Abraham Lincoln

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