Endgame in Libya? It's move two in the chess game

It's truly amazing that Republicans have finally, FINALLY found a war they oppose, which is 2 two week long, minor little air attack. I'm sure they're shy of the "entanglement" that this could created. They don't mind being in Iraq or Afghanistan for 8 years with no end in sight. They didn't mind when Bush 41 committed US ground forces to Somalia. These missions didn't have clearly defined objectives, especially 2 weeks into them. They were all hugely costly in terms of money and American lives. How many American lives have been lost in the current Libyan intervention? Sarah Palin is beside herself complaining about the $600 million dollar cost of the operation when Iraq and Afghanistan combined cost thousands of times as much and still are not over. And how dumb do you have to be to be confused about what is going on in Libya? We're bombing Gadaffi's forces and (not so) secretly arming the rebels. Rightwing dunderheads want to know what the "endgame" looks like. Big clue here. This isn't even close to the "end game". We're not even at the middle game. They want to know how the last move of the game will look when we are at move two on the chessboard. Hint to armchair generals like Sarah: don't use chess metaphors when you don't even understand how shoots and ladders works. You want Obama to predict how things will turn out 37 moves in the future when you can't even figure out how the horsie moves. I will note that Saint Ronald bombed Libya in 1986, and it is part of right-wing orthodoxy that Reagan can do no wrong. Nobody asked what his "end game" was there. He just wanted to bomb Gadaffi, and that was good enough. Of course Obama would never be allowed the same license.

Hypocritical war-hawks against Libyan operation

It's amazing how right-wingers have supported pretty much every war that Bush 43 ever started, but now have discovered their opposition to these same kinds of operations, the moment Obama became president. They had no problem with wars in Iraq and Afghanistan dragging on for many years after their optimistically promised deadlines, but now, by golly, they don't want foreign entanglements.

Operations in Libya have been going on for about a week and right-wingers have already insisted that we are in a quagmire, that there is no plan for an exit strategy, and despite the fact that nothing could be more clear or obvious to anyone with an an IQ greater than 50 as to what we are doing (no fly plus destroying pro-gadaffi heavy weaponry), they insist that they have absolutely no clue what the mission there is.

Granted, when right-wingers plead ignorance and stupidity, it's hard not to believe them. However, even they aren't dumb enough to truly be confused about the situation. Gas prices have skyrocketed since Libya became destabilized, and it is certainly in the US national interests (and indeed in NATO's interest) to restore stability.

However, the US did even better, going to the UN and the Arab League, and allies like NATO and securing promises from all of them that they would specifically confront genocide and war-crimes that Gadaffi and his supporters were committing and are still committing. These types of justifications have been used for many interventions, including George Bush 41's intervention in Somalia, which put American ground forces there for months, saddling the next president with a military morass that ultimately resulted in events like those described in Blackhawk Down.

The only thing more clear than the mission in Libya is the glaring hypocrisy of war-hawks who now pretend to oppose current operations with the flimsiest of excuses. They think the mission is too vague. Welcome to the fog or war. Most missions are vague. They think it's too costly. Please, it costs nothing compared to any of the other military conflicts we have engaged in recently, and the potential benefits outweight any conceivable costs by at least an order of magnitude (i.e. ten times).

I know that right-wingers are ignorant of a lot of things, but surely even they have heard the part of the Marine Hymn (you know, line one) that says, "From the Halls of Montezuma to the shores of Tripoli...." Even several hundred years ago it was in our national interest to insure that matters in Tripoli (that's Libya for folks for still haven't figured that out) remain stable.

Nuclear's Teenage Invincibility Syndrome

I see it everyday with teenagers. They all think that they are indestructible and therefore that nothing bad can ever happen to them. It is egotism, and wishful thinking too be sure, but at least teenagers have the excuse of youth. The nuclear industry constantly evinces a similar level of false confidence in the invincibility of their technology. Yet, they are far from invincible, as the events in Fukushima, Japan show all too clearly. The designs of these reactors were downright negligent and slipshod in terms of disaster preparedness. Even a smaller tsunami likely could have flooded the basement levels where their electric pumps and batteries were kept to circulate coolant. This design is about like giving a beer helmet to a teenage driver and expecting that he (or she) will use it solely for head protection.

Similarly, the cooling facilities for spent rods clearly are inadequate to prevent the release of radioactive materials in the case of emergency. The "invincible" plan was that water would always cool the rods. But what happens, as in the case in Japan, when these pools crack and spring leaks? What happens when the facility around it catches on fire?

Perhaps teenagers would believe that such systems were failsafe and foolproof, but the people of Tokyo, one of the most populous in the world, must now pay for the foolhardy and all too fallible presumptions of a nuclear industry that needs to finally grow up.

Radio Activism

There is a place for legitimate criticisms of the fat-cat, irresponsible, faked-safety-report culture in the Japanese nuclear industry. However, many concerns by opponents are completely overblown and their ignorance of the science makes all activists look uninformed. Take fears of radioactive iodine crossing the Pacific Ocean and possibly affecting people in California. Those trace amounts which do reach us will most commonly be I-131 which has a half life of 8 days. If it gets absorbed into plants and the plants grow for a month or two before harvest, and then are sent to the green grocer then, by the time it reaches your shopping basket, it would have been degraded by about 4 or 5 half lives, which effectively means there is none of it left.

Nuclear Industry Blames Everyone But Themselves

There was this attempt to rehabilitate nuclear energy a couple years back. A nuclear renaissance was announced. The problem, as always with nuclear, is that the industry is its own worst enemy. They had changed nothing about how they operate or how they plan to operate in the future. Sure they tell you about a million nifty new reactor designs they have, but they don't actually intend to build. Yes, those designs are safer and more convenient, but they would also be too expensive, or in some cases, not expensive enough, and they don't want either one of those scenarios. They want the multi-billion behemoth that has massive cost overruns. They claim that those darned protesters and alarmists are causing the cost overruns, but they secretly don't really mind spending more money, especially when Uncle Sam is guaranteeing the loan and kicking in huge subsidies to boot.

Unfortunately, the nuclear renaissance ground to a halt because nuclear power, in short order, did what it did best, which was tripping over its own feet and taking itself out of the game. Of course the Japanese reactor in Fukushima is 40 years old, built toward the end of the first nuclear golden age. However, it will likely spell the end of the second golden age before it even had much of a chance to get started.

That's the thing about nuclear power that must be so maddening for the fans. The harder it tries, the more spectacularly it fails. And right now the Japanese nuclear industry is flirting with epic failure.

The almost complete inability to respond in a real emergency situation underscores one of the real issues with nuclear power and not the phony ones about protesters or CO2 emissions. The real problem with nuclear is that it cannot insure itself against the risks it creates, because the risks are too large. No insurance company on the planet wants to insure nuclear reactors. The governments themselves have to provide this kind of insurance. Therefore, in the middle of real emergencies like Tsunamis, the government also has to scramble to clean up the mess left by a nuclear industry who always wants to cut corners and which has few incentives to act otherwise.

Indeed, why should they break their backs to insure safety when the government will always jump in and save their bacon in the end. It's not like these types of explosions and releases of radioactive materials hadn't happened in the past in Japan. Faked safety reports and slapdash concern for safety have been hallmarks of the industry for decades, since nuclear energy is a national priority, due to low fossil fuel reserves. However, the second unfortunate geographical fact about Japan is that they live in one of the most quake-prone areas of the world. There is a reason that we all use the Japanese word tsunami to describe what happened there.

Gosh, given the huge amount of geological activty, why does Japan produce so little power from geothermal anyway? Estimates are that they could produce dozens of gigawatts, with current technology. That might mean a dozen or so less nuclear plants, which would be a baker's dozen less headaches.

Obama finally mans up...sort of

It might be French jets in the skies over Libya, but they are only part of a coalition lead by the US and NATO who are finally acting to blunt Gadafi's murderous warfare against his own people. Naturally, Obama didn't want to hand another PR victory to Al Quaeda by having American planes strike the first blow, though they could have long ago. By spreading the risk around and forcing the Europeans and even the Arab League countries to be part of this operation it leaves the US far less exposed and less on the hook for potential problems down the line. Critics of Obama will criticize absolutely any action he takes no matter what as they always have. If he had intervened they would have preached the virtue of doing exactly what he is doing now, which is coalition building and working with allies. So naturally, now Obama's opponents insist that he should have been more of a cowboy and acted weeks sooner before there were any UN resolutions or public commitments from other countries to help out.

The reality is that if the US had decided to act alone, before others were ready, then this would have removed all the pressure from other countries and their participation would have evaporated. The US should not have to fix all world problems, and we need the rest of the world to get used to that. Europeans will have to act, especially in their own backyard, if they regard the threat as grave enough.

BTW, this conflict is far from over. There are still all kinds of problems, including the potential destruction of huge amounts of oil production infrastructure, which could make the price of gas go through the roof again. I hope that Obama prosecutes price-fixers this time. Bush certainly wouldn't/didn't because he was in bed with them as an oil tycoon himself.

Mexicans didn't steal my job and education didn't bankrupt the state

I have a friend who is an English teacher, who is convinced that illegal Mexican immigrants are out to "steal his job". I told him, Jim (not his real name), you're an ENGLISH teacher. How is a mexican worker, who doesn't even speak ENGLISH, going to steal YOUR job as an ENGLISH teacher? Of course, the delusional often have answers. Jim thinks that they will do it through "bilingual education", which he insists is not BI-lingual at all, but just an attempt to replace English with Spanish as our official language. I must not have noticed how, according to him, we are being prohibited from speaking English in this country and instead being forced to speak Spanish for all official transactions.

Perhaps he should be more worried about the right-wing assault on teacher pay and attempts to do away with all job security for teachers, where they can be fired instantly, without due process, and seniority will count for nothing. These are the people trying to steal jobs from teachers and trying to take money out of their paychecks, and their pensions to boot.

Some argue that the state has the right to cut teacher pay and take money away from their pensions because those jobs are paid for by taxpayers. Well teachers are taxpayers too, so they have as much interest as any other taxpayer in whether the government uses the money wisely. However, the law says that students have to attend school and the wages they pay to teachers in public schools are less than the wages that most private schools pay. Therefore, if anything, the taxpayers are getting a bargain.

Furthermore, the fact that taxpayers are paying for something doesn't mean that the government is entitled to cheat the person doing the work. If the government contracts with a person to build a bridge and then politicians get together an vote that they only want to pay the contractor half of already agreed upon price, then they can't justify this on the grounds that "the taxpayers are paying for it", or even that "taxes are too high already". It may be that taxpayers are cash strapped, but the bridge still needs to be built and the materials still cost what they cost. You can't vote to repeal either one of these facts.

The same applies to education. It still costs a certain amount to train a person who is willing to endure day-long abuse by teachers, administrators, parents, etc while delivering all the most up-to-date educational material and following all the rules required of them (by the government/taxpayers). You passed laws which demanded that we teach the way we teach. You passed laws that said we had to have certain amounts of training. You spelled out in minute detail every single area you wanted us to cover in the educational standards. You asked for it and we gave it to you at a price we already agreed upon. You can't now turn around and say that you didn't really want all those things and you don't want to pay us for the work we did because you think taxes are too high.

It's not the fault of teachers that taxes are too high, and this wouldn't be an excuse to cheat us out of our salaries and pensions anyway. Sure, the government spent money on our salaries and pensions, just like they spent money on lots of other things. However, that doesn't prove that teachers are the ones to blame for the governments financial woes.

Some people say, but education is a huge part of the state budget, and this is true. But that doesn't prove that we created the mess. If you lower taxes and have other economic mismanagement, reducing revenues, education will still be a large chunk of the budget. However, the reason for the reduction in revenues is not because of education spending. It's because of those other things, like cutting taxes in the middle of a recession, and investing state funds poorly. I understand that other taxpayers are also hurting in a recession. But that doesn't entitle them to get together and vote to raid my bank account so that they can all have a nice vacation. That's money that I saved out of my paycheck, which I already noted is a smaller paycheck than many private schools pay out.

Likewise, the money that I put into pension funds is largely my money, even if my employer made some contributions too. I dare say that I have put far more of my money into my teacher pension, as both a teacher and taxpayer, than the average taxpayer is. These same people who begrudge me my pension, despite the fact that I serve the public and educate their children, get pensions of their own. If the government had no pension then it is unlikely that they would be able to attract teachers in the first place. We would instead work for private companies who offered these pensions. So the government has to offer comparable benefits to get us to work for them.

This all part of the social contract which so-called conservatives want to abruptly rip to shreds after decades and even centuries of agreement about what constituted a fair day's pay for a fair day's work. That doesn't sound very "conservative" to me. It sounds like an untested scheme that is likely to fail along with many other gimmicks and quick fixes that often get proposed as shortcuts to dealing with difficult problems.

Jim's brother hates government too, even though Jim's brother Bruce worked as a police officer for 20 years before retiring on a state pension. He too thinks that the government is trying to pick his pocket and that immigrants are here to take the part time job that he still has to work as an emergency dispatcher to make ends meet.

I asked Bruce, if you want to prevent immigrants from taking your jobs, how do you propose to shut down all the internet and telephone communications in the country. Bruce wasn't sure what I meant, but I pointed out to him that he works in the telecommunications industry and there are plenty of people in India and elsewhere in the world who are also being hired by US firms to handle call center traffic. We call this outsourcing.

If Bruce is worried about all the immigrants trying to take his job, what about the "digital immigrants" who can work from half a world away for less than half of what they pay Bruce? Furthermore, how will the US government collect tax revenues on the digital immigrants living in India. They won't of course, because they are Indian citizens, not American citizens. But these jobs used to be done by American workers whom they could tax. Even illegal immigrants who were here physically, often ended up paying taxes, albeit into a social security account that was not actually their own. These illegal immigrants in the flesh often had tax deductions taken out of their paychecks, but they know that they cannot attempt to collect them, because then the government might discover that they are undocumented workers and send them back. So the government gets money from them, but never has to give them refunds or social security benefits.

This isn't true of digital workers. In fact, I have also heard people make the modest proposal that we could save a lot of money if we just hired people from India to teach in our public schools, via the internet. The only question I have for these people, aside from the one's raised above, is how they expect Mister Depak to maintain order in the classroom and keep the kids on task and not killing each other from half a world away? When Johnny isn't learning and says he doesn't understand what Mr. Deepak from Bangalore is trying to teach him, what are we going to do then? Call in Mr. Chang from Bejing perhaps?

Maybe a better idea would be to try to ditch the silly schemes to nickel and dime teachers in this country, stop all the constant interference, and let us do our jobs. I know that virtually every person who is not a teacher thinks that he or she can teach better than the people who actually are the teachers, but I don't come to McDonalds and tell you you're flipping burgers wrong, so why don't you stop coming to school and giving me bad advice on how to teach.

And stop worrying about Mexicans trying to take your job. They prefer tacos, not burgers, and fast food isn't much of a job to steal in the first place. Neither is making beds in a hotel or picking cotton. Even hundreds of years ago Americans didn't want to do that, which is why they imported slaves to do it for them. Now the (wage) slaves are coming here voluntarily, and we say the (wage) slaves are stealing our job. Sorry, I don't want a slave job. If that's the kind of job they are stealing then I feel sorry for the (wage) slave, but I certainly don't lament the fact that an American no longer has to work it. I wish the (wage) slave didn't have to work it either.