Inane Taskers

Effect of The Great War On The English Countryside

noreply@blogger.com (Dagpotter) — Sat, 31 Oct 2009 21:48:00 +0000

In the Thirties there came about the term "Thankful Villages" to describe those towns that lost no men in World War I. This list at HELLFIRE Corner is the most comprehensive identified to date.

There are less then fifty on the list from across the countries. Most contributed every few men to the war effort showing they were rather small but still it indicates that out of hundreds of towns then existing very few saw no loss when the British Empire lost almost one million men.

Form Follows Function In Air Defense Headquarters

noreply@blogger.com (Dagpotter) — Wed, 28 Oct 2009 11:27:00 +0000

These two articles show abandoned Cold War civil and air defense command posts. One in the Former Soviet Union and one in England. It is interesting to see that they are very similar in layout and capabilities.

First on English Russia is Abandoned Military Object which is of an air defense center where data is collected and filtered and defenses coordinated and activated.

Second is on Subterranea Britannica: Cold War and shows a Regional War Room at Cardiff, Wales where the Government would run operations during a nuclear attack. Much of these designs were based on British experience during World War II with building air defense and command posts.

These show how a like these kind of facilities are no matter where they are built or designed.

Firing Rather Then Divorcing Your Spouse

noreply@blogger.com (Dagpotter) — Sun, 25 Oct 2009 11:12:00 +0000

Frank McCourt is the owners of the Los Angeles Dodgers who were last seen losing to the Phillies in the National League Championship. His current wife, Jamie, was the CEO of the team. A few weeks ago it was announced that the two were getting divorced, but it has now come out that he is really firing her for being a poor employee not so much as divorcing her.

According to the Los Angeles Times "Frank McCourt charged his estranged wife with insubordination and inappropriate behavior in a letter firing her as the team's chief executive."

I guess if they were getting divorced he had to fire her but it is an interesting approach none-the-less.

Lefty Bloggers Need To Get Their Stories Straight On Stimulus

noreply@blogger.com (Dagpotter) — Sat, 03 Oct 2009 18:48:00 +0000

At this post Steven Benen is decrying the fact that $40 billion in state aid was cut out of the stimulus so states had to lay people off. In this article there is criticism of the states for using stimulus money to just keep the status quo.

So which is it? Was the stimulus just to keep bureaucrats employed at the cost of the U.S. taxpayer or to actually do something different? Here in AL the legislature used the stimulus money to just balance the budget. That will work out well next year.

The problem the states are facing is due to the collapse in the economy there has been a massive decline in tax revenue of all kinds. The state and local governments were pretty fat and now they have to trim down. That means people are losing their jobs. Maybe when the economy recovers and Americans get private jobs they can go back to subsidizing the government.

Perish The Thought, Huntsville City Council Being Short Sighted

noreply@blogger.com (Dagpotter) — Wed, 23 Sep 2009 11:33:00 +0000

Mayor Battle of Huntsville presented his budget to the City Council. As part of his plan he would like to recommend eliminating step and COLA raises for a couple of years for city employees. The Council does not like the idea. They want to continue them. Heck, the Federal Government intends to not give COLA's to Social Security recipients for the next two years.

While raises are nice the other option is layoffs. This has happened in other parts of the U.S. due to the recession. Counties and states have recommended furloughs or not increasing pay and the unions have run to courts to not allow these. Then there are layoffs. Mayor Battle's proposal seems fairly reasonable. At least it could be done for one year. Maybe next year the economy will recover and raises could happen?

The other interesting thing about the article is that I thought the City bought the Rescue Mission to tear it down to build a new road. Now they are saying city offices are moving into it. Maybe the road won't take up the whole thing?

FDA Didn't Know Menthol Makes The Smoke Better

noreply@blogger.com (Dagpotter) — Wed, 23 Sep 2009 01:07:00 +0000

Effective today the Food & Drug Administration has banned clove and sweet flavored cigarettes. Due to industry pressure they did not do so with menthol flavored ones. Interestingly the article in USA Today quoted a researcher as stating "We all thought until quite recently that menthol was just a neutral flavor."

I guess they didn't do much research. Menthol to me was always minty and made smoking a cigarette much easier. They have also only been around for several dozens of years. I guess this is what passes for science now.

Libertarians and the Confederate States

noreply@blogger.com (Dagpotter) — Sun, 20 Sep 2009 12:43:00 +0000

I did not know that there was a group within Libertarianism that holds the Confederate States of America (CSA) up as a good example of limited government in North America. This is not necessarily considered a good or correct interpretation as Doug Mataconis explains at his blog, Below the Beltway.

One issue the CSA faced as it organized was a lack of cooperation among the states which made it harder to get armies set up. This led to the U.S.'s ability to seize important areas and resources. So it contributed somewhat to its defeat.

Who Knew Obama Controls All Funding For Liberal Groups?

noreply@blogger.com (Dagpotter) — Mon, 07 Sep 2009 02:47:00 +0000

Via Riehl World View we come to understand that Firedoglake the angry liberal site is claiming that President Obama is stabbing the left in the back.

The anger is caused by the Van Jones resignation. Some on the left are claiming that Obama should have supported Jones through thick-and-thin. Now Firedoglake is saying that if you do not support Obama you lose all of your "institutional funding". I am not sure what that is but assume it is Democratic party or non-profits that fund liberal groups.

Anyway I did not know that the President was so powerful that he could cut funding to a blog or group overnight. If only the Republicans could get so organized.

Banal Soviet Bureaucrats Mask Terror Of Soviet Communism

noreply@blogger.com (Dagpotter) — Mon, 07 Sep 2009 02:17:00 +0000

The Yale University Press has been publishing a series of books on Soviet Communist rule in Russia utilizing primary documents from archives that have come available since the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991.

They have started to put some of their recent works actual documents on the internet. One of them is files from the KGB on Andrei Sakharov. This noted Soviet atomic scientist became a leading dissident in the late Sixties and Seventies causing no end of problems for the Brezhnev regime.

Many of the source documents are reports on Sakharov's activities sent under Yuri Andropov's signature to the Central Committee. Andropov was the head of the KGB and ended up being the last leader of Soviet Russia before Gorbachov.

Some of the highlights include reports like this: "Sakharov continues to produce and disseminate slanderous letters concerning Soviet reality. In conversations with his confederates, Sakharov assesses policies of the Party and government from a negative standpoint, and he also associates himself with demagogic assertions of nationalistically inclined individuals about the situation of Jews in the USSR."

Another work is about Stalin's persecution of the COMINTERN and the elimination of foriegn Communists. One particularly interesting document is a statement of Irena Kun the sister of Hungarian Communist Bela Kun. Bela Kun was able to establish a Communist regime in Hungary for a few years after World War I. In the Thirties many of the leaders fled to the Soviet Union and were eventually punished by Stalin. Irena Kun is trying to protect herself by claiming that Georg Benedek another Hungarian in Moscow made up stories about her being a Trotskyist and traitor.

Kun blames a bad recommendation from her brother for his denouncing her. "I have known Benedek for 3 years, we live in the same building. He studied at the VKU where I was working. I always knew that he was mentally unsound. But I would never have suspected him of being so mean until, according to his own words, c. Bela Kun refused to give him a recommendation to the KUNMZ graduate school in June-August 1935. After that, he started telling me and c. E. Nagy[iv] things that aroused my suspicions that Benedek was either crazy or an agent provocateur."

The documents illustrate the paranoia among the intellectuals of a movement where they spent decades eating each other and protecting themselves. They could trust no one or anyone. They also showed the dutiful bureaucrats of the KGB and Party routinely reporting on each other to higher ups explaining faults and problems by blaming poor commitment to the Soviet cause or foreign provocateurs.

In all it shows that large numbers of people spent all their time running around reporting on each other in lengthy memorandum. Certainly these people contributed little of meaning to society or the economy. It might explain all the problems the Soviet economy might have had.

Contractors Good For Something -- Being A Force Mulitplier In Afghanistan

noreply@blogger.com (Dagpotter) — Wed, 02 Sep 2009 11:45:00 +0000

For the last eight years one of the biggest complaints from the American left was that George Bush was in the sway of big government contractors. They did too much of the housekeeping services in Iraq and Afghanistan. Companies like KBR lined their pockets at the expense of the troops and taxpayers. They were doing jobs that green suiters or civil servants should be doing.

Unfortunately due to the small size of the military they had to use contractors for those jobs. This has been a trend going back thirty years. Use contractors to wash clothes, cook food and clean latrines. Then there would be more soldiers freed up to do the fighting. Despite a consistent philosophy on the use of support contractors Bush received holy hell about it. True the scale in Iraq was much larger then it ever had been before and the contracts were in some case let quickly and didn't have enough oversight but people were trying to get things done.

Now the word is that Obama wants to increase the number of foot soldiers in Afghanistan but without increasing the number of U.S. troops deployed to that country. One way to do this is to reduce the number of soldiers assigned to logistic support units, command headquarters, maintenance and so one and do a one-for-one swap with "trigger pullers". How do you do this and still provide the enormous tail that U.S. forces need? Use contractors.

It might be possible to assign U.S. civil servants to do this but there have been many issues in the past with getting them to serve in Iraq and Afghanistan. It is too dangerous or not career enhancing. Certainly there is a number of people assigned or who volunteer for these positions but to get the kind of capability that is needed it will have to be contractors. Contractors like KBR or other such companies experienced in logistics and maintenance.

This will not be an easy or quick switch. The ground troops will have to be designated from either those in Iraq or in the U.S. recovering from a recent deployment. Then they will have to be trained and equipped up. A plan will be figured out how to deploy a 1000 support troops and replace them with a battalion of infantry. The support infrastructure will probably have to switch first. Contractors taking over for the rear echelon folks.

Another challenge will be writing and awarding the contracts for this. Unless they plan on expanding existing contracts there will be a several month period of writing the RFP, putting it out and evaluating the proposals. Awards may be protested which could add to the delays. Once awarded the contractors will have to hire their people and get them into place. Expect the almost constant sniping from Congress and the Media about this. See the LOGCAP contract from Iraq for example.

The Obama administration really cannot do anything else. They have reached the fish-or-cut-bait point. Either abandon Afghanistan or pour resources in. At the same time he does not want to "surge" troops there as that will make him and many Democrats look like idiots for opposing the same in Iraq. So he does the next best thing: surge contractors to maximize his troop availability. Good luck to them and the soldiers.

Cross posted at Defense Procurement News

Parker Griffith Hits The Big Time

noreply@blogger.com (Dagpotter) — Wed, 26 Aug 2009 02:21:00 +0000

Our local Congressman is Democrat Parker Griffith. He won a squeaker of an election to fill the seat of a surprise retirement. Griffith is considered a "Bluedog" conservative Democrat who has spoken out against both the health care reform bill and the cap-and-trade act. Now in an interview with The Huntsville Times after a town hall on health care he has hit the big time.

One of the criticisms from this fairly conservative district is that while Griffith may be conservative himself he supports the Democratic agenda in Congress generally and voted for Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) to be speaker. In the interview Griffith now says that he "...would not vote for her. Someone that divisive and that polarizing cannot bring us together."

That statement has hit the blogosphere and is now all over Memeorandum as it got picked up by US News and World Report and various lefty and right blogs.

It would be good but it is hard to believe that if Griffith is re-elected which is not assured right now that he wouldn't go along with whomever the Democrats run for Speaker.

Army Email Getting More Portable?

noreply@blogger.com (Dagpotter) — Fri, 21 Aug 2009 02:31:00 +0000

I came across this article in Federal Computer Week about how the Army has put out a Request for Information(RFI) to unify its email systems. Right now the Army manages them at various command and installation levels. The RFI would be for an enterprise system to manage all email, calendar and other functions for all those using Army email. One benefit supposedly of this would be to reduce the cost to the Army.

One of the problems that the Army current system has is its security level. To access non-classified email you have to log into a computer with a Common Access Card (CAC) Card and pin. The card stays in the computer in order to utilize it. This means that to get your email away from your work site you use your CAC in a laptop or use a Blackberry.

Personally I think a Blackberry presents a whole host of security issues and in fact this whole idea highlights the major problem with the Army's IT set up: security. It has limited functionality and ads considerable cost. An employee if their manager desires email from home or off site requires a laptop or blackberry as well as whatever system they use at work. This increases the cost to the government to outfit each employee.

The proposed system is required to use a CAC so it will require dedicated machines to support. It would be hard to see how much cost savings could be made by this idea unless it maximizes the use of existing equipment and that owned by the employee.

More to come on this as it fleshes out but security will make this hard to implement.

Just What The Raiders Need

noreply@blogger.com (Dagpotter) — Tue, 18 Aug 2009 01:42:00 +0000

This is not very constructive. Reports: Cable punched Hanson

Worst Lip Sych Evah!!!

noreply@blogger.com (Dagpotter) — Mon, 17 Aug 2009 01:00:00 +0000

It is tough New Wave melody with lots of keyboards and high pitched vocals but the female part of this Peter Schilling appearance on a German TV show has to be about as bad as it can get. Starts around 0:42. Peter doesn't do that great a job either.

Using Posterous

noreply@blogger.com (Dagpotter) — Sun, 16 Aug 2009 23:48:00 +0000

In a desperate search for traffic to my actual real blogs I have set up google reader to allow me to push stuff to Posterous. Then I have Posterous push it to my Twitter feed. We will see what this accomplishes.

Of course it is yet another account to remember.

Arsenal Stuns Everton And Whole Premiership

noreply@blogger.com (Dagpotter) — Sat, 15 Aug 2009 23:14:00 +0000

While Arsenal has had quite an off season they are still one of the top teams in the Premiership. There should really be no doubt that they could beat Everton to start the year even at Everton's stadium. To win, though, 6-1 is just crazy. It gives them a tremendous jump on the rest of the league. For more on this stellar victory which saw Cesc with two goals see the Telegraph.

Newport News Advertising

noreply@blogger.com (Dagpotter) — Fri, 07 Aug 2009 02:29:00 +0000

Since I write for three different blogs now (real ones not vanity sites like this) I spend a great deal of time browsing around at various newspaper and news sites. I also go to many political blogs researching things and getting edumacated. The Newport News bikini ads are everywhere. They must have one heck of a budget or just place them on sites I go to.

Here I am also giving them free advertising just by talking about them.

New Site About Smurfs

noreply@blogger.com (Dagpotter) — Mon, 03 Aug 2009 10:41:00 +0000

If you are interested in the upcoming Smurf movie here is a good site about it: Smurfplanet.com. Yes, they are actually making a live action movie about the Smurfs.

Huntsville Mirrors The U.S. On Housing Sales

noreply@blogger.com (Dagpotter) — Mon, 03 Aug 2009 10:23:00 +0000

This subscriber only article at The Wall Street Journal reports that the recovery to date in the U.S. housing market has been focused on the low end of the market. If you have a high end home it is still hard to sell. This is what was reported in The Huntsville Times as well about the local market. There has been an uptick but it has only been in the low-to-moderate price.

Unfortunately I cannot find the article on their website www.al.com.

It is probably for the reasons that large mortgages are hard to get and people do not want to borrow several hundred thousand dollars anyway with the uncertainty in the job market and economy overall.

Testing Out iCam

noreply@blogger.com (Dagpotter) — Sun, 02 Aug 2009 01:30:00 +0000

I put iCam on my iPhone and got it installed on working on both my PC and a netbook with a built in camera. The result is seeing the beautiful me in stereo on my iPhone. I don't know if I will really use this but the technology is so neat I couldn't help myself.

A Rule Of Blogging About Arguments Or Arguments About Blogging

noreply@blogger.com (Dagpotter) — Wed, 29 Jul 2009 22:34:00 +0000

Not for me to come up with a rule for blogging but anytime an argument devolves into the court scene from Animal House I say it is over. The Other McCain goes there in the big Erin Andrews/Douglas/Little Miss Attila dispute.

Oh Yeah it wasn't over when the Germans bombed Pearl Harbor.

Obama's Presidency Will Be Over When...

noreply@blogger.com (Dagpotter) — Sun, 26 Jul 2009 20:05:00 +0000

Robert Gibbs says that the President doesn't pay attention to the polls but is just doing what is best for the U.S. people. At the current trend I would say that is Labor Day.

When Fiction Becomes Truth - Big Bang Theory Strikes

noreply@blogger.com (Dagpotter) — Mon, 20 Jul 2009 10:34:00 +0000

I guess Wolowitz from Big Bang Theory did really design and fabricate the toilet on the International Space Station (ISS). It is reported that the waste disposal system has flooded the orbiting base.

Meritocracy and Affirmative Action

noreply@blogger.com (Dagpotter) — Sat, 11 Jul 2009 00:21:00 +0000

Mr. Other McCain has a post here about meritocracy. Having worked in the Federal Government for the last twenty years or so I have come across the concept of meritocracy and affirmative action in action. At one of my jobs were a group of fine senior Federal employees we called the "bitchy GS-15 women". These were a group of women that had been hired, groomed and worked their way up to decision level management who lorded themselves over everybody because of their "position". Their problem was that they had never been told that hey had made a mistake or screwed up. Constantly promoted and receiving the highest ratings they could not consider of making mistake and demanded the respect they were due to the point that they were not only annoying but self-destructive. McCaian calls this "Elitism as Self-Congratulation"; and the only point they were where they were because they were women first; then fairly competent people later. In many ways they were oblivious of this.

Rant kind of over.

Proper and Efficient Use of Free Time

noreply@blogger.com (Dagpotter) — Sat, 11 Jul 2009 00:02:00 +0000

Hey, I work one full time job and blog for three sites and I do have free time to explore the internet. Perhaps I don't have enough time to write one thousand word plot summaries of Seinfeld episodes. Not that I don't like Seinfeld as I am one of those Gen X'ers that it speaks to.