Give Trump a chance

One of the nice things about living in a small town is that you can write to the editor of the local paper and actually share your wisdom in print.

I had such an article in last week's paper. It's about the choice between voting for Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton, and the decisions people needed to make in the recent election. I invite you to read it for yourself.

NOAA is doctoring temperature data, as you suspected

Whistleblowers at the U.S. government’s official keeper of the global warming stats, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), claim their agency doctored temperature data to hide the fact that global temperatures plateaued almost 20 years ago.  The fact that temperatures have not increased for the last 20 years is well-known in the community that follows the global warming controversy. NOAA produced a new study that said the temperature actually had increased. Turns out that the new data has been selective adjusted to change the results.

Link assortment

I've been negligent lately posting and blogging.  Here are an assortment of links for your consideration:

A Minnesota philosophy professor writes that immigrants have low IQs and refugees are part of "religious-political cult." He's wrong of course, but Reaction is intense from the usual suspects.

Could a Single Marine Unit Destroy the Roman Empire? It was a hypothetical question that became a long online discussion and now a movie in development: Could a small group of heavily armed modern-day Marines take down the Roman Empire at its height?

Phil McKenna at New Scientist "dams may be among the riskier power sources in the world". It turns out that nuclear power is much safer than either dams or coal as energy sources.

This article claims that the women's march was a failure, largely because nobody know what it was about I kind of thought the same thing. When it was forming up, I went to their web site to see what they wanted. It was an unstructured rant and the only thing that stood out was abortion. In fact, a pro-life group wasn't allowed in the march, even though they were women.

I have always thought that the war on second-hand smoke lacked credibility. It's unpleasant of course, but the reaction has been overblown.  This article agrees with me, says it's "fake science". Here's a follow-up article

The press doesn't just have Trump Derangement Syndrome. They now have full-blown Trump Psychosis. And like most people with serious disorders, they are teetering close to the brink of self-immolation.

Remember Obama's stimulus? California spent their funds on a dam that was in pretty good shape instead of Oroville Dam that actually needed some work

Mike Flynn lost his job as a result of the nation's spooks. Here the details  And here's a good follow-up about putting the pieces together

More on fake news: how the media messed up the story about the Olympian who was detained by Homeland Security because of Trump's Muslim ban.

More on Muslim honor killings "Mob Kills Eloped Lovers After Storming Afghan Police Station"

A comprehensive article about Neil Gorsuch, nominee for Supreme Court Justice. Worth reading.

Is the military ready to fight? Most of the Navy's strike fighters are gounded

Sometimes there's good news from the Middle East. The Hamas explosives chief accidentally blows himself up  I particularly enjoys this part:

The report quoted medical sources who said the Hamas commander had been brought to the hospital with his arms and legs blown off.

Academics write scholarly articles. They have to publish of course in their quest for tenure. No surprise that nobody reads them  at least those in the social sciences, which don't even say anything, but that the "research" often isn't repeatable.

Who is H R McMaster?

H. R. McMaster was just selected by Donald Trump to be national security advisor.  I was impressed by this quotation from another web site:

With President Trump selecting LTG HR McMaster to be the next National Security Advisor, we will no doubt be hearing a lot about the Battle of 73 Easting in the Gulf War. Captain McMaster was in the middle of what may be “the last great tank battle” when his Troop and one other destroyed a brigade of Iraqi tanks. History channel featured it in their series “Greatest Tank Battles” and it is a must watch; I imagine they will replay it soon because of this appointment.

I wanted to add a couple thoughts as I served under him and while I didn’t interact much with him personally, it was clear that McMaster may be the smartest man I have ever met – I went to an “elite” northeast academy and an Ivy – and nobody I know can hold a candle to his ability to learn every side and nuance of almost every conflict around the globe. While at Fort Benning, I was selected by my commander to head up the International Military Student Office where roughly 1000 foreign officers and non-commissioned officers from nearly 100 allied nations attend US Army courses. McMaster was the commanding general at the time of the Maneuver Center of Excellence (combined Infantry and Armor schools) and since it was a somewhat sensitive posting, I had to meet him personally. He was very knowledgeable of what my job would entail and made sure I understood, but he also knew about my entire career up to that point; this is impressive as he had hundreds of captains under him, but not exactly rare as it is a common characteristic of leaders effective enough to make flag rank.

What impressed me the most about him was his interaction with the international students. One of the courses that the international students attended was the captains’ career course and I had 7 cycles of 25-30 students in each ranging in rank from Lieutenant to Lieutenant Colonel. At the end of each class, MG McMaster would have a lunch with them where he would open the floor to any and all questions. These students came from every part of the world, and McMaster was able to answer nearly every question with stunning detail and understanding of the entire geopolitical ramifications behind each situation. In fact, only once did I every hear him say “I am not entirely familiar with that situation…” if I remember correctly, it revolved around a (relatively) new narcotics conflict in Suriname, but he then still answered the question by being able to draw upon knowledge he had in narcotics trafficking conflicts in other parts of South America, and the overall political climate in Suriname. The most challenging questions came from the Pakistanis of the class and while they sometimes became heated, he would approach the student after and speak personally to ensure that while they may not like what he said, they understood that he felt he had to answer them honestly – there was never hard feelings and always mutual respect from both him and the student. Every single student I spoke to afterward was blown away by how McMaster addressed their question and appreciated how much he understood about the problems in their home countries.

These Q&A sessions were scheduled for an hour and almost always went much longer as he was willing and eager to interact with those students whom he told would be “the future leaders of our allies” Imagine being a Lieutenant from a small nation being given this kid of respect and deference by a 2-star general of the US Army! These lunches were not mandatory but he did them anyway because the foreign students sent to study in the US are those officers whose nations predict will be their future senior leaders, quite possibly even some heads of state; McMaster understood to his core that the impressions he made then would affect US foreign relations 10, 20, 30 years into the future.

McMaster is a speed reader and I believe he also has a photographic memory. He was able to have an expansive grasp of the political ramifications on almost every live conflict in the world and it wasn’t even his job at the time to know them – his job was to train Infantry and Armor officers, but he knew that adding this aspect to his own education and the educations of those studying under him would make them better. This man is a perfect fit for the job of NSA and hopefully he will not meet the same resistance that so many current appointees encounter.

TJ Buttrick, CPT, US Army (retired)

McMaster wrote a best selling book on what went wrong in the Viet Nam War. Read the reviews on Amazon

Socialism

How to evaluate a president

Scott Adams, who predicted back in 2015 that Trump would win the election talks about how to evaluate his performance so far

If you see the world in terms of goals, you might think President Trump has failed at every important goal so far. He didn’t get what he wanted on immigration. He hasn’t gotten his Supreme Court nomination confirmed. He hasn’t replaced Obamacare. He hasn’t defeated ISIS. He hasn’t done a lot of things he said he would do. He even had to fire General Flynn. President Trump is a big ol’ failure when it comes to goals

Read the whole thing to see where this is going.

Oroville Dam is a metafor for California

Victor Davis Hanson on the state of the State

The poor condition of the dam is almost too good a metaphor for the condition of the state as a whole; its possible failure is a reflection of California’s civic decline.

State lawmakers spend their time obsessing over minutia: a prohibition against free grocery bags and rules against disturbing bobcats. When they do turn their attention to development, they tend to pick projects that serve urban rather than rural populations — for example, that boondoggle of a bullet train whose costs keep climbing even as the project falls years behind schedule.