Category Archives: defense policy

Veterans Administration Strikes Again

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And once again, its blow contributes to a death. This time, it’s the VA’s Talihina, Oklahoma, facility, and this place allowed maggots to breed in the injury of a veteran.

Executive Director Myles Deering said the maggots were discovered while the patient was alive but were not the cause of his death. He said the man came into the center with an infection.

Deering tried to play down the incident:

He did not succumb as a result of the parasites.  He succumbed as a result of the sepsis.

This is the level of attention, much less actual medical care, our veterans get from the VA.  Never mind that if this facility’s imitation medical personnel had taken the infection seriously, they would have noticed the maggots and maybe done something about them.  And maybe cleaned up the flies and the flies’ eggs whence the maggots came.  And maybe cleaned up the whole facility a little bit.

Four persons, a physician’s assistant and the Talihina facility’s Director of Nursing and two other nurses, have been allowed to resign over the matter.  Never mind any accountability for these.  Never mind the allegedly attending physician responsible for this veteran’s care receiving being held accountable, so far, at least.

It’s long past time to get rid of the VA and to use its budget and what would have been its budgets in succeeding years to provide vouchers for our veterans so they can get the care they need from the doctors and hospitals they choose.

Veteranos Administratio delende est.

Republic of China and President-Elect Donald Trump

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It’s time to start correcting some errors of long standing, and it may be (it is too soon to be confident of this) that President-Elect Donald Trump is beginning to do that with his telecon with the President of the RoC.

“The one-China policy is the cornerstone of the healthy development of China-US relations and we hope this political foundation will not be interfered with or damaged,” [Chinese Foreign Minister Yi] Wang was quoted as saying.

This illustrates one of those errors.  The Republic of China is separate from the People’s Republic of China—that’s why Chiang Kai-shek and his Kuomintang followers and lots of others left the mainland for the island of Taiwan.  They wanted no part of Mao Tse-tung’s butcherous communist state, including declining to be a part of that.

[RoC President Ing-wen] Tsai also told Trump that she hoped the US would support Taiwan in its participation in international affairs, the office said, in an apparent reference to China’s efforts to isolate Taiwan from global institutions such as the United Nations.

It said the two also discussed “promoting domestic economic development and strengthening national defense[.]”

Indeed.  We need to be plusing up the RoC’s ability to defend itself and loudly repeating our commitment to the nation’s defense, especially against the backdrop of the PRC’s naked aggression in the East and South China Seas and its occupation of the latter.

Of course, the Obama administration objects to this apparent show of non-timidity.  A carefully anonymous “senior Obama administration official,” who’s not supposed to be talking at all “because of the sensitive diplomatic relations involved” complained

The White House learned of the conversation after it had taken place

No hypocrisy here at all.  Its not at all like Congress learning of the White House’s immigration moves with “refugees” that Australia had rejected only after the fact.  Nossir.  Never mind that the President-Elect, nor does any American, have any obligation to seek the President’s permission to make or take a telephone call.

The administration isn’t the only gang with trouble with this call, though.  The whole of the Left is up in arms; their dismay is exemplified by this from Bonnie Glaser of the Center for Strategic and International Studies:

I think privately, they [the PRC] will definitely seek to educate this incoming president and ensure that he understands the sensitivity of Taiwan[.]

Because an American President should be taking guidance—education, even—from America’s enemies.  Glaser (and the PRC) are right, though, that matters relating to the RoC are sensitive–just not for her reasons.  The island nation’s freedom is hanging on a thread.

Along these same lines, I look forward to the new President Trump hosting the Dalai Lama at a State Dinner sometime this winter.

A couple of small nits from the article at the link, too: it’s the Republic of China; the island on which the nation sits is Taiwan.  Also, the citizens of the RoC have been increasing their push for independence from the People’s Republic of China over the last several years; Tsai Ing-wen was just elected President of the RoC in no small part because of her and her party’s long-standing push for independence.

In sum, we absolutely need to tighten and strengthen our relationship with the RoC, and that includes working closely with them politically, economically, and militarily.

Foolishness

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This time regarding the Iran nuclear weapons deal, exemplified by this excerpt from a Wall Street Journal article concerning the Obama administration’s efforts to strengthen that deal during these last two months of overt lameduckness.

The picture they [Obama officials] plan to articulate for Mr Trump’s team is stark: if the agreement falls apart, and the US is blamed for its collapse, Iran would resume its nuclear program more aggressively. In that case, the US risks alienating Europe, as well as China and Russia, and limiting its ability to use sanctions again to contain Iran. Military action against Tehran’s nuclear facilities, these officials argue, could be the only alternative.

If the deal falls apart, Iran surely will accelerate its nuclear weapons development program.  But this is a program that Iran has never stopped, nor even held in abeyance, the deal notwithstanding.  Iran is aggressively pursuing development of missiles capable of delivering nuclear warheads against Israel and Europe, and Iran already has been caught—twice—with more heavy water than the deal permits.  Honest mistakes, that water.  Sure.

The US risks alienating Russia and the PRC?  They already are alienated from us, and have been for some time: see Georgia, Ukraine, Kaliningrad, the East China Sea, the South China Sea, the two nations’ cyber attacks against us, and on and on.

Limiting our ability to use sanctions again?  That was lost when the guy who sits in the Secretary of State’s chair, John “Motorboat Skipper” Kerry, with President Barack Obama’s (D) backing, browbeat France into accepting a much weaker deal than even the French wanted.  It was lost, too, when the Obama administration lifted so many of our sanctions and agreed to the lifting of UN sanctions.

Military action is the only alternative left?  To the extent that’s true (and it isn’t; alternatives remain, even if many of them have been made harder to use by this administration), it is so strictly as the outcome of the Obama administration’s foolishness.

Be Careful Out There

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…as you use your Android smartphones.  Some of them, courtesy of a People’s Republic of China company called Shanghai Adups Technology Co, are infected with malware at the point of manufacture.  Phone manufacturers include BLU Products, ZTE, and Huawei; although not all of BLU’s models are infected.  ZTE and Huawei both are State-owned, and both of these refused to answer Consumer Reports‘ requests for information.

The problem is that Shanghai Adups, a supplier of Firmware Over-The-Air (FOTA) update services for smartphones, has inserted code that it wrote for the purpose into these phones’ firmware that

transmit[] their owners’ personal data to a computer server in China. It’s not clear how the data was being used, though security experts say it could have been accessible by the Chinese government.

Heads up.