Ebola

A second nurse from Dallas has come down with Ebola.  She has been flown to Atlanta for treatment.  The first nurse has been transferred to a facility in Maryland.  Both are under strict quarantine to prevent further spread.  Of course, they both contracted it from Thomas Duncan who was in quarantine.  Not a very effective quarantine, it turns out.  Mr. Duncan's family have been quarantined in their apartment for weeks though they have yet to exhibit symptoms.  What can we conclude?  Quarantine is the best known method for preventing the spread of the virus.

The Ebola outbreak is centered in 3 West African countries.  These countries have not been quarantined, which is how Mr. Duncan found his way to a Dallas, Texas.  Great Britain has banned travel from the region.  Why haven't we?  The current panic that is spreading across the country could have been averted if we had a travel ban.  Rather than a ban, the government has decided to check the temperature of travelers from the region, a policy that - if in place at the time - would have allowed Thomas Duncan into the country!  Are we morons?  Moreover, the policy has only been instituted at 5 airports which handle 90 to 95% of the all traffic from the region.  Therefore, we are allowing 5 to 10% of travelers from Ebola-plagued countries to enter the US without even this inadequate screening?

 

What of the CDC director?  Thomas Frieden was part of former NYC Mayor Bloomberg's bans against large sodas.  Here is a man willing to impose policies that will prevent you from drinking too much soda and bringing on health problems years or decades from now but is unwilling to suggest a policy to prevent a virus that has a 50 to 90% fatality rate days after being contracted.  If only he could be as determined to prevent Ebola as he is to prevent obesity.

 

To add to the incomprehensibility of the government response, we are sending thousands of troops to the afflicted regions.  To what end?  Short of killing off anyone who might be infected (which would be immoral and criminal) like in the opening of the movie Outbreak, the military is just going to put more Americans in the path of the virus.  It feels like we are sending the troops in order to claim to be 'doing something' about Ebola.  It may not be doing any good but at least action is being taken.

Foregin Policy Blunder

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/islamic-state/11156264/Iraq-asks-for-US-ground-troops-as-Isil-threaten-Baghdad.html

As many predicted, pulling every US troop out of Iraq meant it was virtually certain that all the gains achieved would be reversed.  Such has come to pass.  Unfortunately for Obama, he is still in office.  He withdrew the troops, he proudly ran for re-election on the fact that he withdrew the troops, and now Iraq is crumbling.

We stayed in Germany after World War II until... oh, yeah, we're still there.  How is Germany doing?  We stayed in Japan after WWII until... still there.  Japan doing okay?  What about South Korea?  Still there and it is prospering.  Let's look at the places where we didn't stay.  Vietnam?  It got pretty ugly after we left.  How about Haiti?  We've sent troops to Haiti many times but they always left.  Haiti is a basket case.  With this sort of record, why would we choose to leave?  It was a virtual guarantee of disaster.  But it made for a good campaign slogan for Obama's final election.

 

There are two strategic options for dealing with ISIS.  The first is to fight to win.  That would mean ground troops, tanks, re-established bases in Iraq, and a real war.  The second is to wash our hands of the matter and let the locals sort it out.  Either you want to beat them or you don't.  Now, there are also political options.  Strategic option 1 is anathema to the Democrat-base in the run-up to a midterm election.  Also, option 1 lays bare the blunder in removing troops in the first place.  Strategic option 2 is unacceptable because the American people demand some sort of action in the wake of beheaded Americans.  Thus we have the political option.  We go to war just enough to be 'doing something' but not enough to actually win.

 

The president's rhetoric has sounded hawkish, claiming we will destroy ISIS.  He says that is the goal but he does not provide the means of achieving that end.  He is all talk.  As the saying goes, actions speak louder than words.  Obama's actions, be they with regard to Russia's invasion of the Ukraine, Syria's use of chemical weapons, or a desire to defeat ISIS, always show that his threats are idle.  The thugs of the world have a couple years in which to seize power and territory because Obama isn't going to commit to stopping them.

Boyhood

The movie opens with a 7 year-old Mason Evans Jr. (played by Ellar Coltrane) lying in the grass and staring at the clouds. It ends with that same actor 12 years later stating an inanity that he considers profound. That is the shtick of this movie. Over a 12 year period, the same core of actors filmed for 46 days, so about 4 days a year. To watch the kids grow up before you is pretty cool, but that doesn’t make a film; that makes home movies. If this exact same film was made all at once with multiple actors playing Mason at the various ages of development, it would be widely panned as a boring, going nowhere coming-of-age stinker. The shtick is all this movie has.

Mason starts off as a cute kid but develops into a lost teenager who looks surprisingly unkempt but somehow attracts hot girls. So many scenes go nowhere. At one point, we see Mason being bullied in the boys’ restroom and that’s an end of that. There is no resolution, no response on his part, just a move to the next part of his life. By the end, Mason is a youth who seems to shrug his shoulders to show emotion and many of his lines include “I guess” or “I don’t know.”

One message of the film is that fathers suck. Yeah, dads are mostly bad guys, usually drunkards who may even brutalize their wives. Mason’s real father (played by Ethan Hawke) is initially an irresponsible doper who eventually gets his act together. But he isn’t so much a father as a buddy. There is nothing disciplinary about Mason Sr., just a cool guy and big brother figure.

The message on mothers isn’t all that great either. Mason’s mom (Patricia Arquette) starts off as a struggling single-mother but she goes back to school to get a degree for a better job. Along the way, she marries one of her professors (the drunken brute) then, after getting her master’s degree, she marries one of her students (who is merely a drunk). When Mason leaves for college, she breaks down that her life is over.

Why couldn’t he let the characters be apolitical? No, Mason’s parents are both Democrats, his father more vociferously so. His father, who only spends a couple weekends a month with them, decided to spend one of those days posting Obama/Biden signs. He even has Mason steal a McCain sign from a yard. Then we have the old man who threatens to shoot Mason for daring to ask if he can post an Obama sign. See, Republicans are nasty, villainous people. Later, we meet an Iraq war vet who says it was a war for oil; he later descends into drunkenness and is written out of the story. See! Look what Bush’s War did to the veterans. However, there was a bit of fun poked at Obama supporters; one young mother explains how she sees herself in a make-out session with handsome Senator Obama.

The cultural references were fun, from Mason’s sister singing Brittany Spears, to Harry Potter excitement, to Lady Gaga, to the iPhone. Shot as it was provided the ability to give a very accurate view of the given year (no anachronisms to be found).

The shtick is all that carries this movie and it didn’t carry it very far for me.

Utah Samurai?

Just read the most unexpected headline:

Polygamist women dressed 'like ninjas' attack home of witness in Utah sex assault case

That caught my attention!  So I read on...

Two armed “polygamist women” dressed like “ninjas” were subdued by a sword-wielding man during a home invasion, according to police in suburban Utah.

Ninjas against a guy with a sword!  Wow, if only this had happened a couple of years ago, it could have been a great episode of Big Love.  Here's the link to the whole story:

http://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/sep/20/polygamist-women-utah-sex-assault-case?CMP=twt_gu

Security Breach

A man jumped the fence and made it into the White House.  How could that possibly happen?  That is a failure of such a magnitude that I have a hard time believing it.  I would sooner have thought someone had gotten into Fort Knox and run off with a few gold ingots.  With this kind of failure, there had best be a handful of firings at the Secret Service.

This is a timely breech of security.  Access to the White House is controlled to make sure that no one who intends harm to the President is allowed to enter.  By the same reasoning, we have borders and immigration laws.  It has been reported that Middle Easterners have been captured crossing the southern border.  Most likely, those who have been caught - and the inevitable fraction who slipped through - are only seeking a better life.  But we don't know for sure.

Scotland Forever

Tomorrow, Scotland will have a vote on whether to break from the United Kingdom.  It is a peculiar development since Scotland didn't eagerly join the UK; I don't think Wales or Ireland joined eagerly either.  The Act of Union (1707) was mutually agreed upon by both nations.  Unlike Wales and Ireland, Scottish kings had ruled in England - the Stuarts - making Union less a conquest than a marriage.  However the Scots were led to union on account of a financial disaster.  It was a time of colonies in the New World and Scotland wanted to share in the bounty.  The country had put itself in great debt for the Darien Scheme which failed miserably.  Between disease and hostile Spaniards, the Panamanian colony of Scots was decimated.  The English piled on the disaster by seizing a would-be trade vessel.  In the wake of the catastrophe, union with England looked better than financial ruin.

Of course, most people probably think about Braveheart and William Wallace.  It has been 20 years since Mel Gibson portrayed a clean-shaven Wallace who supposedly had an affair with Princess Isabella and fathered Edward III.  Enjoyable though that film was, it was mostly fictional nonsense.  However, it did spawn a renewed desire for Scottish independence. 

Based on how the Scots vote for parliament, I suspect they will not be pleased with the end result.  Oh, sticking it to the English might please them and being the masters of their own destiny will be exciting for a while but Scotland is a small economy that has enjoyed benefits from a larger economy.  An independent Scotland will need to raise taxes to maintain the level of government it now enjoys.  Moreover, it might find itself shunned by the European Union lest the EU encourage more separatist movements.  I think independence would benefit them in the long run but be harsh in the short run.

 

Of special note, Sean Connery will come home if the Yes party wins.

Romney Returns

I will be the first to say that I would far prefer to have had Mitt Romney as president for the last two years than Barack Obama.  That said, he had his shot.  He had the best shot of any challenger of a sitting president in more than 30 years.  With a disastrous economy, collapsing foreign policy, and high and persistent unemployment, Romney lost.  Millions of Republicans sat at home rather than go to the polls and vote Romney.  Many of them may be regretting that decision in light of the further collapse of foreign policy (e.g. Ukraine, Iraq, Israel-Palestine) and the still floundering economy but that is not a reason to vote for Romney in 2016.

 

While ads savaged Romney for the death by cancer of the wife of a man who had several years earlier lost his job and health insurance when Bain Capital closed his factory, Mitt ran no such attack ads against President Obama.  There were no ads that the president left Americans to die in Benghazi.  There were no ads about Fast and Furious.  There weren't even ads about the president's numerous golf outings (playing golf was practically a war crime during the Bush Presidency).  McCain ran the same campaign four years earlier and Romney didn't learn from that.  Will he play hardball in 2016?  I doubt it.

 

If he can't get votes against someone with an unimpressive four year record, how is he going to get votes against a blank slate?  There is a reason that neither party reruns a loser.