The fault, dear conservatives, is in ....

I don't often have much good to say about the Weekly Standard. Too many times, they were entirely too comfortable with the concept of compassionate conservatism. Howsomever, this time they've hired a writer who hit the nail on the head; and it's a nail that needed hitting:

We Blew It
A look back in remorse on the conservative opportunity that was squandered.
by P.J. O'Rourke
11/17/2008, Volume 014, Issue 09


Let us bend over and kiss our ass goodbye. Our 28-year conservative opportunity to fix the moral and practical boundaries of government is gone--gone with the bear market and the Bear Stearns and the bear that's headed off to do you-know-what in the woods on our philosophy.


None of this is the fault of the left. After the events of the 20th century--national socialism, international socialism, inter-species socialism from Earth First--anyone who is still on the left is obviously insane and not responsible for his or her actions. No, we on the right did it. The financial crisis that is hoisting us on our own petard is only the latest (if the last) of the petard hoistings that have issued from the hindquarters of our movement. We've had nearly three decades to educate the electorate about freedom, responsibility, and the evils of collectivism, and we responded by creating a big-city-public-school-system of a learning environment.

Liberalism had been running wild in the nation since the Great Depression. At the end of the Carter administration we had it cornered in one of its dreadful low-income housing projects or smelly public parks or some such place, and we held the Taser gun in our hand, pointed it at the beast's swollen gut, and didn't pull the trigger. Liberalism wasn't zapped and rolled away on a gurney and confined somewhere until it expired from natural causes such as natural law or natural rights.

In our preaching and our practice we neglected to convey the organic and universal nature of freedom. Thus we ensured our loss before we even began our winning streak. Barry Goldwater was an admirable and principled man. He took an admirably principled stand on states' rights. But he was dead wrong. Separate isn't equal. Ask a kid whose parents are divorced.

Since then modern conservatism has been plagued by the wrong friends and the wrong foes. The "Southern Strategy" was bequeathed to the Republican party by Richard Nixon--not a bad friend of conservatism but no friend at all. The Southern Strategy wasn't needed. Southern whites were on--begging the pardon of the Scopes trial jury--an evolutionary course toward becoming Republican. There's a joke in Arkansas about a candidate hustling votes in the country. The candidate asks a farmer how many children he has.

"I've got six sons," the farmer says.

"Are they all good little Democrats?" the candidate asks.

"Well," the farmer says, "five of 'em are. But my oldest boy, he got to readin'  .  .  .  "

There was no need to piss off the entire black population of America to get Dixie's electoral votes. And despising cracker trash who have a laundry hamper full of bedsheets with eye-holes cut in them does not make a man a liberal.

Blacks used to poll Republican. They did so right up until Mrs. Roosevelt made some sympathetic noises in 1932. And her husband didn't even deliver on Eleanor's promises.

It's not hard to move a voting bloc. And it should be especially easy to move voters to the right. Sensible adults are conservative in most aspects of their private lives. If this weren't so, imagine driving on I-95: The majority of drivers are drunk, stoned, making out, or watching TV, while the rest are trying to calculate the size of their carbon footprints on the backs of Whole Foods receipts while negotiating lane changes.

People are even more conservative if they have children. Nobody with kids is a liberal, except maybe one pothead in Marin County. Everybody wants his or her children to respect freedom, exercise responsibility, be honest, get educated, have opportunities, and own a bunch of guns. (The last is optional and includes, but is not limited to, me, my friends in New Hampshire, and Sarah Palin.)

Reagan managed to reach out to blue collar whites. But there his reach stopped, leaving many people on our side, but barely knowing it. There are enough yarmulkes among the neocons to show that Jews are not immune to conservatism. Few practicing Catholics vote Democratic anymore except in Massachusetts where they put something in the communion wafers. When it comes to a full-on, hemp-wearing, kelp-eating, mandala-tatted, fool-coifed liberal with socks in sandals, I have never met a Muslim like that or a Chinese and very few Hispanics. No U.S. immigrants from the Indian subcontinent fill that bill (the odd charlatan yogi excepted), nor do immigrants from Africa, Eastern Europe, or East Asia. And Japanese tourists may go so far as socks in sandals, but their liberal nonsense stops at the ankles.

We have all of this going for us, worldwide. And yet we chose to deliver our sermons only to the faithful or the already converted. Of course the trailer park Protestants yell "Amen." If you were handling rattlesnakes and keeping dinosaurs for pets, would you vote for the party that gets money from PETA?

In how many ways did we fail conservatism? And who can count that high? Take just one example of our unconserved tendency to poke our noses into other people's business: abortion. Democracy--be it howsoever conservative--is a manifestation of the will of the people. We may argue with the people as a man may argue with his wife, but in the end we must submit to the fact of being married. Get a pro-life friend drunk to the truth-telling stage and ask him what happens if his 14-year-old gets knocked up. What if it's rape? Some people truly have the courage of their convictions. I don't know if I'm one of them. I might kill the baby. I will kill the boy.

The real message of the conservative pro-life position is that we're in favor of living. We consider people--with a few obvious exceptions--to be assets. Liberals consider people to be nuisances. People are always needing more government resources to feed, house, and clothe them and to pick up the trash around their FEMA trailers and to make sure their self-esteem is high enough to join community organizers lobbying for more government resources.

If the citizenry insists that abortion remain legal--and, in a passive and conflicted way, the citizenry seems to be doing so--then give the issue a rest. Meanwhile we can, with the public's blessing, refuse to spend taxpayers' money on killing, circumscribe the timing and method of taking a human life, make sure parental consent is obtained when underage girls are involved, and tar and feather teenage boys and run them out of town on a rail. The law cannot be made identical with morality. Scan the list of the Ten Commandments and see how many could be enforced even by Rudy Giuliani.

Our impeachment of President Clinton was another example of placing the wrong political emphasis on personal matters. We impeached Clinton for lying to the government. To our surprise the electorate gave us cold comfort. Lying to the government: It's called April 15th. And we accused Clinton of lying about sex, which all men spend their lives doing, starting at 15 bragging about things we haven't done yet, then on to fibbing about things we are doing, and winding up with prevarications about things we no longer can do.

When the Monica Lewinsky news broke, my wife set me straight about the issue. "Here," she said, "is the most powerful man in the world. And everyone hates his wife. What's the matter with Sharon Stone? Instead, he's hitting on an emotionally disturbed intern barely out of her teens." But our horn rims were so fogged with detestation of Clinton that we couldn't see how really detestable he was. If we had stayed our hand in the House of Representatives and treated the brute with shunning or calls for interventions to make him seek help, we might have chased him out of the White House. (Although this probably would have required a U.S. news media from a parallel universe.)

Such things as letting the abortion debate be turned against us and using the gravity of the impeachment process on something that required the fly-swat of pest control were strategic errors. Would that blame could be put on our strategies instead of ourselves. We have lived up to no principle of conservatism.

Government is bigger than ever. We have fattened the stalled ox and hatred therewith rather than dined on herbs where love (and the voter) is. Instead of flattening the Department of Education with a wrecking ball we let it stand as a pulpit for Bill Bennett. When--to switch metaphors yet again--such a white elephant is not discarded someone will eventually try to ride in the howdah on its back. One of our supposed own did. No Child Left Behind? What if they deserve to be left behind? What if they deserve a smack on the behind? A nationwide program to test whether kids are what? Stupid? You've got kids. Kids are stupid.

We railed at welfare and counted it a great victory when Bill Clinton confused a few poor people by making the rules more complicated. But the "French-bread lines" for the rich, the "terrapin soup kitchens," continue their charity without stint.

The sludge and dreck of political muck-funds flowing to prosperous businesses and individuals have gotten deeper and more slippery and stink worse than ever with conservatives minding the sewage works of legislation.

Agriculture is a business that has been up to its bib overalls in politics since the first Thanksgiving dinner kickback to the Indians for subsidizing Pilgrim maize production with fish head fertilizer grants. But never, since the Mayflower knocked the rock in Plymouth, has anything as putrid as the Farm, Nutrition and Bioenergy Act of 2008 been spread upon the land. Just the name says it. There are no farms left. Not like the one grampa grew up on.

A "farm" today means 100,000 chickens in a space the size of a Motel 6 shower stall. If we cared anything about "nutrition" we would--to judge by the mountainous, jiggling flab of Americans--stop growing all food immediately. And "bioenergy" is a fraud of John Edwards-marital-fidelity proportions. Taxpayer money composted to produce a fuel made of alcohol that is more expensive than oil, more polluting than oil, and almost as bad as oil with vermouth and an olive. But this bill passed with bipartisan majorities in both houses of Congress and was happily signed into law by President Bush. Now it's going to cost us at least $285 billion. That's about five times the gross domestic product of prewar Iraq. For what we will spend on the Farm, Nutrition and Bioenergy Act of 2008 we could have avoided the war in Iraq and simply bought a controlling interest in Saddam Hussein's country.

Yes, we got a few tax breaks during the regimes of Reagan and W. But the government is still taking a third of our salary. Is the government doing a third of our job? Is the government doing a third of our dishes? Our laundry? Our vacuuming? When we go to Hooters is the government tending bar making sure that one out of three margaritas is on the house? If our spouse is feeling romantic and we're tired, does the government come over to our house and take care of foreplay? (Actually, during the Clinton administration  .  .  .  )

Anyway, a low tax rate is not--never mind the rhetoric of every conservative politician--a bedrock principle of conservatism. The principle is fiscal responsibility.

Conservatives should never say to voters, "We can lower your taxes." Conservatives should say to voters, "You can raise spending. You, the electorate, can, if you choose, have an infinite number of elaborate and expensive government programs. But we, the government, will have to pay for those programs. We have three ways to pay.

"We can inflate the currency, destroying your ability to plan for the future, wrecking the nation's culture of thrift and common sense, and giving free rein to scallywags to borrow money for worthless scams and pay it back 10 cents on the dollar.

"We can raise taxes. If the taxes are levied across the board, money will be taken from everyone's pocket, the economy will stagnate, and the poorest and least advantaged will be harmed the most. If the taxes are levied only on the wealthy, money will be taken from wealthy people's pockets, hampering their capacity to make loans and investments, the economy will stagnate, and the poorest and the least advantaged will be harmed the most.

"And we can borrow, building up a massive national debt. This will cause all of the above things to happen plus it will fund Red Chinese nuclear submarines that will be popping up in San Francisco Bay to get some decent Szechwan take-out."

Yes, this would make for longer and less pithy stump speeches. But we'd be showing ourselves to be men and women of principle. It might cost us, short-term. We might get knocked down for not whoring after bioenergy votes in the Iowa caucuses. But at least we wouldn't land on our scruples. And we could get up again with dignity intact, dust ourselves off, and take another punch at the liberal bully-boys who want to snatch the citizenry's freedom and tuck that freedom, like a trophy feather, into the hatbands of their greasy political bowlers.

But are we men and women of principle? And I don't mean in the matter of tricky and private concerns like gay marriage. Civil marriage is an issue of contract law. A constitutional amendment against gay marriage? I don't get it. How about a constitutional amendment against first marriages? Now we're talking. No, I speak, once again, of the geological foundations of conservatism.

Where was the meum and the tuum in our shakedown of Washington lobbyists? It took a Democratic majority in the House of Representatives 40 years--from 1954 to 1994--to get that corrupt and arrogant. And we managed it in just 12. (Who says Republicans don't have much on the ball?)

Our attitude toward immigration has been repulsive. Are we not pro-life? Are not immigrants alive? Unfortunately, no, a lot of them aren't after attempting to cross our borders. Conservative immigration policies are as stupid as conservative attitudes are gross. Fence the border and give a huge boost to the Mexican ladder industry. Put the National Guard on the Rio Grande and know that U.S. troops are standing between you and yard care. George W. Bush, at his most beneficent, said if illegal immigrants wanted citizenship they would have to do three things: Pay taxes, learn English, and work in a meaningful job. Bush doesn't meet two out of three of those qualifications. And where would you rather eat? At a Vietnamese restaurant? Or in the Ayn Rand Café? Hey, waiter, are the burgers any good? Atlas shrugged. (We would, however, be able to have a smoke at the latter establishment.)

To go from slime to the sublime, there are the lofty issues about which we never bothered to form enough principles to go out and break them. What is the coherent modern conservative foreign policy?

We may think of this as a post 9/11 problem, but it's been with us all along. What was Reagan thinking, landing Marines in Lebanon to prop up the government of a country that didn't have one? In 1984, I visited the site where the Marines were murdered. It was a beachfront bivouac overlooked on three sides by hills full of hostile Shiite militia. You'd urge your daughter to date Rosie O'Donnell before you'd put troops ashore in such a place.

Since the early 1980s I've been present at the conception (to use the polite term) of many of our foreign policy initiatives. Iran-contra was about as smart as using the U.S. Postal Service to get weapons to anti-Communists. And I notice Danny Ortega is back in power anyway. I had a look into the eyes of the future rulers of Afghanistan at a sura in Peshawar as the Soviets were withdrawing from Kabul. I would rather have had a beer with Leonid Brezhnev.

Fall of the Berlin wall? Being there was fun. Nations that flaked off of the Soviet Union in southeastern Europe, Central Asia, and the Caucasus? Being there was not so fun.

The aftermath of the Gulf war still makes me sick. Fine to save the fat, greedy Kuwaitis and the arrogant, grasping house of Saud, but to hell with the Shiites and Kurds of Iraq until they get some oil.

Then, half a generation later, when we returned with our armies, we expected to be greeted as liberators. And, damn it, we were. I was in Baghdad in April 2003. People were glad to see us, until they noticed that we'd forgotten to bring along any personnel or provisions to feed or doctor the survivors of shock and awe or to get their electricity and water running again. After that they got huffy and began stuffing dynamite down their pants before consulting with the occupying forces.

Is there a moral dimension to foreign policy in our political philosophy? Or do we just exist to help the world's rich people make and keep their money? (And a fine job we've been doing of that lately.)

If we do have morals, where were they while Bosnians were slaughtered? And where were we while Clinton dithered over the massacres in Kosovo and decided, at last, to send the Serbs a message: Mess with the United States and we'll wait six months, then bomb the country next to you. Of Rwanda, I cannot bear to think, let alone jest.

And now, to glue and screw the lid on our coffin, comes this financial crisis. For almost three decades we've been trying to teach average Americans to act like "stakeholders" in their economy. They learned. They're crying and whining for government bailouts just like the billionaire stakeholders in banks and investment houses. Aid, I can assure you, will be forthcoming from President Obama.

Then average Americans will learn the wisdom of Ronald Reagan's statement: "The ten most dangerous words in the English language are, 'I'm from the federal government, and I'm here to help.' " Ask a Katrina survivor.

The left has no idea what's going on in the financial crisis. And I honor their confusion. Jim Jerk down the road from me, with all the cars up on blocks in his front yard, falls behind in his mortgage payments, and the economy of Iceland implodes. I'm missing a few pieces of this puzzle myself.

Under constant political pressure, which went almost unresisted by conservatives, a lot of lousy mortgages that would never be repaid were handed out to Jim Jerk and his drinking buddies and all the ex-wives and single mothers with whom Jim and his pals have littered the nation.

Wall Street looked at the worthless paper and thought, "How can we make a buck off this?" The answer was to wrap it in a bow. Take a wide enough variety of lousy mortgages--some from the East, some from the West, some from the cities, some from the suburbs, some from shacks, some from McMansions--bundle them together and put pressure on the bond rating agencies to do fancy risk management math, and you get a "collateralized debt obligation" with a triple-A rating. Good as cash. Until it wasn't.

Or, put another way, Wall Street was pulling the "room full of horse s--" trick. Brokerages were saying, "We're going to sell you a room full of horse s--. And with that much horse s--, you just know there's a pony in there somewhere."

Anyway, it's no use blaming Wall Street. Blaming Wall Street for being greedy is like scolding defensive linemen for being big and aggressive. The people on Wall Street never claimed to be public servants. They took no oath of office. They're in it for the money. We pay them to be in it for the money. We don't want our retirement accounts to get a 2 percent return. (Although that sounds pretty good at the moment.)

What will destroy our country and us is not the financial crisis but the fact that liberals think the free market is some kind of sect or cult, which conservatives have asked Americans to take on faith. That's not what the free market is. The free market is just a measurement, a device to tell us what people are willing to pay for any given thing at any given moment. The free market is a bathroom scale. You may hate what you see when you step on the scale. "Jeeze, 230 pounds!" But you can't pass a law making yourself weigh 185. Liberals think you can. And voters--all the voters, right up to the tippy-top corner office of Goldman Sachs--think so too.

We, the conservatives, who do understand the free market, had the responsibility to--as it were--foreclose upon this mess. The market is a measurement, but that measuring does not work to the advantage of a nation or its citizens unless the assessments of volume, circumference, and weight are conducted with transparency and under the rule of law. We've had the rule of law largely in our hands since 1980. Where is the transparency? It's one more job we botched.

Although I must say we're doing good work on our final task--attaching the garden hose to our car's exhaust pipe and running it in through a vent window. Barack and Michelle will be by in a moment with some subsidized ethanol to top up our gas tank. And then we can turn the key.

P.J. O'Rourke is a contributing editor to THE WEEKLY STANDARD.

Personal Work Incentives

The always amazing Greg Mankiw:

My Personal Work Incentives
Here is a question that you may have been thinking about: How do the different candidates' tax plans affect Greg Mankiw's incentive to work?

Okay, you probably haven't been thinking about this. But I have, because, after all, I am Greg Mankiw. And if you are here reading my blog, maybe you have some interest in the random thoughts running through my brain. So bear with me.

Bottom line:

That is, Obama's proposed tax hikes reduce my incentive to work by 62 percent compared to the McCain plan and by 93 percent compared to the no-tax scenario. In a sense, putting the various pieces of the tax system together, I would be facing a marginal tax rate of 93 percent.

Reality Check: The Cost Of Obama's Pledges

Holy ...cow. This is CBS:

Without question, the Barack Obama infomercial served as a very slick and powerful recitation of the biggest promises he's made as a presidential candidate. But the very bigness of his ideas is the problem: he seems blind to the concept his numbers don't add up.

Let's start with his highly suspect, and widely discredited, claim that he can find federal "spending cuts beyond the costs" of his promises. Very few independent economists believe he has identified the savings needed to offset his remarkable list of tax credits, tax cuts and spending pledges.

You can read the rest by clicking the link in the title, or thelink here

Not so flippin' fast, McCain fans. His plan 'works' for the future if inflation stays below 5% for the next 35 years.

Wisdome from the Libertarian Candidate.

"BOMB". I like it!

The Democrats and Republicans agree that they don't want competition. They don't want to hear from me because I came out strong against the Bush/Obama/McCain Bailout (BOMB). The establishment does not want to hear our message.

Go throw 'im a few bucks.

Samuelson's wisdom

What we've discovered is that the real problem is bigger. Large parts of the financial system are too thinly capitalized and too dependent on unreliable short-term debt. Leverage ratios often reached 30 to 1 for investment banks and hedge funds (that is, $30 of debt for every $1 of capital). The presumption was that the MBA types had learned how to "manage risk." That false conceit backfired. Low capital didn't adequately protect against losses. Confidence and trust evaporated, because no one knew which institutions held suspect securities, how much the losses were and who was ultimately safe.

Deleveraging -- a shift from excessive debt toward more capital -- is inevitable and desirable in the long run. The trouble is that, in the short run, it could destabilize the economy if it proceeds too rapidly.

Short hand way of saying that neither of the major-party candidates is likely to get this right.

Holy smokes: Albright Opposes Iraq Pullout Deadline

I take back some of the things I said about her.

Backs Obama’s latest stance on war
[Washington Times, October 17, 2008, Pg. 1]
Madeleine Albright said the Iraq war has created damaging consequences for U.S. diplomacy, but Washington should not agree to a specific troop withdrawal date in the midst of conflict — something supported last year by the presidential candidate she supports — Barack Obama.

"BOMB." I like that.

Good for Gov Palin

One of the best descriptions I've ever heard:

Her track record in Alaska indicates she does one of two things to her critics; Charm them or field dress them.

Paglia and Rubin on Palin

Paglia:

Something has gone seriously wrong with Democratic ideology, which seems to have become a candied set of holier-than-thou bromides attached like tutti-frutti to a quivering green Jell-O mold of adolescent sentimentality.

Rubin:

Elections are won by convincing voters (many apolitical or the “low information” voters that liberals scorn) to join your team. Watching someone do it with style and with gusto is a delight. And if her ticket doesn’t prevail we’d be silly to think that someone as good at it as she is and who obviously enjoys it as much won’t be back again.

I can't even begin to say it better!

Palin & Biden

It's been -- what? -- six weeks since Gov. Palin was added to the McCain ticket. You'da thunked McCain had added Gidget.

There followed the interview with Perky Couric at CBS. I think it's unlikely that the gotcha flavor of that interview was a surprise to anyone. Why, then, was Palin relatively unprepared?

Lead-up to the debate: there are all kinds of leaks on the trouble the lady's having.

Then comes the debate, and -- hey! -- she did OK. She mispronounced the name of the Commander of US forces in Afghanistan (it's McKiernan, Governor, not McClellan). Biden, OTOH, made at least three errors that I counted. Two of them are a no-fooling, this-is-serious kind of mistakes that have me really concerned that Biden might believe his own press.
First, Senator Obama DID say he'd sit down with the Iranian nut without preconditions. If he's changed this opinion, good for him for admitting a mistake. But that's not what Senator Biden asserted; the reason this is so serious
1. It throws uncertainty into the middle east
2. Biden himself accused Obama of being willing to meet... &c.

Second, we never threw Hezbollah out of Lebanon, with or without the French. For a Senate Foreign Affairs Chair to say that we did show a really disturbing lack of knowledge.

Bryan Caplan

One of the really ugly strains of modern government is the breathtaking astonishment when those damn'd voters don't do what's good for 'em. Here's Dr Caplan:

The bottom line is that if you actually read the questions, instead of just looking at the headline, the major bail-out surveys paint rather similar stories. Journalistic summaries of survey results are about as reliable as journalistic summaries of any scientific results. Blame the summarizers (or perhaps the summarizers' readers), not the sources.

http://econlog.econlib.org/archives/2008/09/public_opinion_5.html

A trio of voices on the bailout

Here's Dr Jeffrey Miron of Harvard, who's opposed to the plan. His highlights:

* Government encouraged lenders to relax their standards
* Mortgages were given to people unqualified to repay them, he says
* Rather than a bailout, government should let firms go bankrupt
* Talk of economic Armageddon is scare-mongering, Miron says

Read the rest here

Megan McArdle -- an economics writer for Atlantic magazine -- reacting to yesterday's vote:

"Actually, what I hope is that I'm wrong, we don't need a bailout, and after a period of liquidation, everything will settle down. If so, I will happily confess my error. But I'm very much afraid that I am not wrong, and things are about to get pretty grim."

Dr. Brad DeLong, Professor of Economics at UC Berkeley, is pro-bailout:

"A very good line from Rex Nutting:
"House to Wall Street: Drop Dead: WASHINGTON (MarketWatch) - With a firm rejection of Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson and Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke, the House Republicans have told the financial markets that they'll have to solve their problems on their own, without $700 billion of taxpayer money."

Well, I'll be d-mned!

Steven Landsburg (of the Atlantic Magazine) tots up a comparison of the two major candidates (not including anything about the current financial hoo-rah-rah), and comes up with an endorsement -- albeit a somewhat tepid one -- for McCain!
Quoth the maven:

My whole life I've been mystified by the concept of the "undecided voter." I've never had any problem choosing my candidates and didn't see how anyone else could either. But this year, I've been genuinely on the fence, partly because I haven't been paying close attention, and partly because there seemed ample reason to dislike all of the options.

But over the past few days, as McCain and Obama have ratcheted up their rhetoric over each others' "disastrous" economic policies, I decided to do a little research. Along the way, I had a few surprises about John McCain's voting record, some but not all of them pleasant. Now I don't think I'm undecided anymore.

You can read the rest by clicking on the title to this post!

Ye flippin' stars

To think that I'd see the day when I'm more in agreement with James Galbraith than with Ben Bernanke.

The title of this entry links to the Economist's Voice, a collection of short papers written by mostly left-ish economists.

Its short, focused policy articles fill a gap between the op-ed pages of the newspaper and full-length journal articles.

The only thing standing between Joe Biden and the Presidency...

is Joe Biden's mouth.

"Part of what being a leader does is to instill confidence is to demonstrate what he or she knows what they are talking about and to communicating to people ... this is how we can fix this," Biden said. "When the stock market crashed, Franklin Roosevelt got on the television and didn't just talk about the princes of greed. He said, 'look, here's what happened."

For the record, the market crashed in 1929. FDR became president in 1933. And television reached dozens and dozens of people in the late 20s/early 30s.
So, class, what does this mean? Is the a slip of the tongue; therefore, merely amusing, or does this call Senator Biden's fitness to be prez into question?
Me? I think Biden's dunderheaded -- in lieu of a more pungent term -- call for 3 Iraqs, which Turkey took as a public insult and Iran saw as a challenge to their territorial integrity disqualifies him all by its lonesome.
One thing's for sure: if Gov. Palin had said something like this, the slip would be subject of late-night jokes for the next two months.

Peggy Noonan Slices & Dices

Comes now the discovery that my nephew, who professes himself libertarian, has got problems with Palin. Lyrcism intended. I dinna ken what's driving this, but I suspect it's some of the social conservative stuff Palin asserts. And that leads to an interesting point. Libertarianism -- or classical liberalism, if you'd prefer -- does not demand moral lockstep. You can, if you'd like, assert that same-sex marriage is immoral and still call yourself a Libertarian; what you can't do is invoke coercive power to force that view on others.

The incomparable Noonan documents one of the strangest hissyfits in modern history. Read it all by clicking on the title. Bottom line: fire a broadside when the target's in range.

Then Mrs. Palin, and the catastrophe of the Democratic and
media response to her. Books will be written about this, but because it's so
recent, and so known, we're almost not absorbing how huge it was, and is. Here
was the central liberal mistake: They used the atom bomb just a few days in.
They used it so brutally, and yet so ineptly, in a way so oblivious to the true
contours of the field, that the radiation blew back over their own lines. They
used it without preliminary diplomatic talks, multilateral meetings or Security
Council debate. They just went boom. And it boomeranged.
The atom bomb was
personal and sexual perfidy, backwoods knuckle-draggin' ma and pa saying, Tell
the neighbors the baby's ours. Then the ritual abuse of the 17-year-old girl.
Then the rest of it—bad mother, religious weirdo. (On this latter it must be
noted that Mrs. Palin never told a church that the Iraq war was God's will; she
asked them to pray that it was God's will. It wasn't the sound of Republican
hubris, it was the sound of Christian humility: We can't know the mind of God,
we can only pray we are in accord with it.)
All of this was unacceptable to
normal Americans. They experienced it as the town gossip spreading rumor and
slander before the new neighbor even got to put down her bags. It offended the
American sense of fairness. And—it still lives!—gallantry.
Most crucially,
the snobbery of it, the meanness of it, reminded the entire country, for the
first time in a decade, what it is they don't like about the left. Really,
America had forgotten.

Samuelson on Health Care

It is widely assumed that health care, like most aspects of American life, shamefully shortchanges the poor. This is less true than it seems. Glance at the adjacent table (You'll have to link back to the article to see the table-- ed.). It comes from economist Gary Burtless of the Brookings Institution (nota: Brookings is generally labeled a [modern] liberal organization) and is based on a government survey of health spending. Burtless was understandably astonished when he assembled these data: they show that, on average, annual health spending per person—from all private and government sources—is equal for the poorest and the richest Americans. In 2003, it was $4,477 for the poorest fifth and $4,451 for the richest.

What's missing is delivery. Getting health care to the poor usually requires them to spend hours waiting. The personal incentive: don't go until you have to.

If Palin were POTUS

Tigerhawk posts some nominal questions for Palin to answer regarding defense & foreign affairs.
I'm going to finish the whole problem up:
If something horrible were to happen soon after January 2009, I will take advantage of the depth of the Republican Bench. That evening I would make four phone calls -- after telling my Chief of Staff to cause the Secretary of State and the National Security Advisor to materialize in front of my desk -- to:

• Former Secretary, former National Security Advisor, former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs Colin Powell
• Former National Security Advisor and former Secreatary Condoleeza Rice
• Former Secretary of Defense and former Chief of the CIA Gates
• Former Secretary of Defense -- in a democratic adminsitration -- and fomer Senator -- William Perry.
  

"Hey, guys, I need you.
The point is, lack of foreign policy experience isn't an issue as long as she -- Palin -- knows it exists.

The heroes of Flight 93 only reportedly stormed the flight deck

Don't believe me, go talk to the Associated Press. Money shot:

In Pennsylvania, at least 200 people gathered Thursday morning at an observance in a reclaimed minefield in Shanksville where Flight 93 came down after passengers reportedly stormed the cockpit to thwart terrorists' plans to use that plane as a weapon like the others. Bells were to toll and victims' names would be read as part of the service.

Social sciences core principles

This actually comes from the National Council on Economic Education; however, has -- as we say -- universal applicability:

• People Choose
• Choices involve costs. All choices. It may be time, it may be pain, it may be money; doesn't matter: it's a cost.
• Subset: the opposite of cost is benefit, a/k/a 'negative cost'
  
• Incentives matter.
  
• Society influences choices and incentives
• Voluntary trade creates wealth. Wealth does not have to be money.
  
• The consequences of choosing are in the future. Would some pow'r ....
  

OoRaH

Y'all will be some kinda pleased to know that the Marines have taught -- I think a better word is 'motivated' -- the Recruit to, and I quote, "Shave, shower, and pee in 10 minutes."

OohRAH

Jim has started recruit training. There is, in other words, another McFadden actively defending the country, and you all may sleep soundly in your beds again. Jim is the 5th Generation, in unbroken line, of McFaddens to serve:
Charles W. Minnesota National Guard
Archibald G.W. USN
Grafton R. USN
Rodney G. USNR
James. A. USMCR

Godspeed. Semper Fi!

And if we go home....

We will have helped train a new generation of jihadis to believe that if they kill several thousand troops, we will surrender. The last time we taught them this lesson was in Somalia, which in Bin Laden's words
But your most disgraceful case was in Somalia; where- after vigorous propaganda about the power of the USA and its post cold war leadership of the new world order- you moved tens of thousands of international force, including twenty eight thousands American solders into Somalia. However, when tens of your solders were killed in minor battles and one American Pilot was dragged in the streets of Mogadishu you left the area carrying disappointment, humiliation, defeat and your dead with you. Clinton appeared in front of the whole world threatening and promising revenge , but these threats were merely a preparation for withdrawal. You have been disgraced by Allah and you withdrew; the extent of your impotence and weaknesses became very clear. It was a pleasure for the "heart" of every Muslim and a remedy to the "chests" of believing nations to see you defeated in the three Islamic cities of Beirut , Aden and Mogadishu.

Arnold Kling's newest wisdom

I like the concept of "Civil Societarian" whilst acknowledging that it's an extremely awkward phrase!
The emphasis is mine.
"...the challenge that government poses to civil society goes beyond economics. When we treat government as a parent, we weaken the family. When we worship government, we overpower other religions. When we look to government every time there is a problem, we undermine those who have independent, creative solutions. Katrina-ravaged New Orleans was let down by its Democratic mayor, its Democratic governor, and its Republican President. It was not let down by private-sector volunteers. "

P&I Urges Use of Parallel Indexing

The London P&I Club has said that two recent casualties may well have been avoided if the bridge teams of the vessels involved had made use of parallel indexing, a radar technique which can enable navigators to monitor continuously for cross track error
P&I Urges Use of Parallel Indexing
Editor's comment: "Too bloody right!"

DHS flips off mariners

Not that it's a surprise:
SUBJ: TRANSPORTATION WORKER IDENTIFICATION CREDENTIAL (TWIC) FINAL RULE UPDATE

1. ON 22 MAY 2006, THE COAST GUARD AND THE TRANSPORTATION SECURITY ADMINISTRATION (TSA) PUBLISHED THE TWIC JOINT NOTICE OF PROPOSED RULEMAKING (NPRM). FOUR PUBLIC MEETINGS WERE HELD IN LATE MAY AND EARLY JUNE IN NEWARK, NJ; TAMPA, FL; ST. LOUIS, MO; AND LONG BEACH, CA. DURING THE 45 DAY COMMENT PERIOD, THE COAST GUARD AND TSA RECEIVED OVER 1900 COMMENTS ON THIS RULE. A NUMBER OF THESE REQUESTED AN EXTENSION OF THE COMMENT PERIOD AND ADDITIONAL PUBLIC MEETINGS, MANY OF THESE ALSO VOICED CONCERN REGARDING CARD READER TECHNOLOGY, ANALYSIS OF ECONOMIC IMPACT, POTENTIAL NEGATIVE IMPACTS TO COMMERCE, AND UNCERTAINTY AS TO HOW TWIC REQUIREMENTS FOR FACILITIES AND VESSELS COULD BE MET.

2. AFTER A REVIEW OF THE COMMENTS RECEIVED DURING THE PUBLIC COMMENT PERIOD AND THE REQUESTS FOR EXTENSION, TSA AND THE COAST GUARD DECIDED NOT TO EXTEND THE COMMENT PERIOD FOR THE NPRM.INSTEAD, TWIC IMPLEMENTATION PROVISIONS IN THE NPRM HAVE BEEN DIVIDED INTO TWO RULES. TSA AND COAST GUARD HAVE CONCLUDED THAT FACILITY AND VESSEL OWNERS AND OPERATORS WILL NOT BE REQUIRED TO PURCHASE OR INSTALL CARD READERS DURING THE FIRST PHASE OF THE TWIC IMPLEMENTATION (FIRST FINAL RULE). ADDITIONALLY, A REQUIREMENT TO PURCHASE AND INSTALL CARD READERS WILL NOT BE IMPLEMENTED UNTIL THE PUBLIC IS AFFORDED FURTHER OPPORTUNITY TO COMMENT ON THAT ASPECT OF THE TWIC PROGRAM. THIS WILL BE ACCOMPLISHED UNDER A SECOND RULEMAKING INITIATIVE CONSISTING OF ANOTHER NPRM AND FINAL RULE.

3. FIELD UNITS ARE ENCOURAGED TO SHARE THIS INFORMATION WITH AREA MARITIME SECURITY COMMITTEES AND LOCAL INDUSTRY REPRESENTATIVES.PUBLIC AFFAIRS GUIDANCE REGARDING TWO TWIC RULEMAKINGS WILL BE AVAILABLE ON THE MTSA-ISPS INTRANET WEBSITE AT HTTP://CGWEB.COMDT.USCG.MIL/G-MP/HELPDESK/HTM . MORE DETAILED GUIDANCE FOR INDUSTRY AND CAPTAINS OF THE PORT IS ANTICIPATED AFTER THE FIRST FINAL RULE HAS BEEN PUBLISHED THROUGH A TWIC NAVIGATION AND VESSEL INSPECTION CIRCULAR AND COMMANDANT INSTRUCTION.
4. QUESTIONS CONCERNING TWIC SHOULD BE DIRECTED TO THE MTSA-ISPS HELPDESK HOTLINE AT 1-877-MTSA-AID (1-877-267-2243).
5. INTERNET RELEASE IS AUTHORIZED.
6. RDML SALERNO, DIRECTOR OF INSPECTIONS AND COMPLIANCE, SENDS.

DOD revises security clearance guidance

DOD revises security clearance guidance: "The Pentagon has cleared the way for defense industrial workers who are facing delays in renewing their security clearances to remain on the job, according to Rep. Rob Simmons (R-Conn.).

The change ?benefits workers whose recertification [is] delayed,? Simmons said in a news release. ?I?m pleased that the Pentagon has clarified its policy, and that our defense workers can get to work where and when national security requirements ? not bureaucracy ? call.? "

NMSAC recommending that TWIC project be slowed down

Maritime Spotlight at Holland & Knight: "NMSAC recommending that TWIC project be slowed down
The National Maritime Security Advisory Committee (NMSAC), sponsored by the Secretary of Homeland Security, is recommending to the Secretary that the Transportation Worker Identification Credential (TWIC) program be slowed down. The Committee is concerned that the public comment period was inadequate; that the technology to be utilized has not been fully tested; that affected individuals have not received adequate notice of the impact of the program; and that the significant issues regarding implementation have not been adequately addressed. While these concerns are not new, they do come from the group selected by the Secretary to advise him on such issues and thus carry added weight. (7/25/06)."

NPFC ISSUES UPDATED FACTS ON OPA 90 LIMITS ON LIABILITY

The USCG National Pollution Funds Center (NPFC) issued an updated set of Frequently Asked Questions
(FAQ) (http://www.uscg.mil/hq/npfc/About%20Us/opa_faqs.htm)that includes a detailed explanation of the new OPA
90 limits on liability. Two items of particular interest: (1) the amended limits for tank vessels come into effect for an
oil discharge or substantial threat of a discharge that occurs on or after October 9, while the amended limits for any other
vessel came into effect on July 11; and (2) the existing certificates of financial responsibility (COFRs) will remain in
effect until the financial responsibility regulations are amended. The NPFC also published an Overview of Title I of
OPA 90 - http://www.uscg.mil/hq/npfc/Documents/PDFs/NPFC_OPA.pdf

T'is a benevolent God, invented coffee

Philadelphia Inquirer | 07/17/2006 | A coffee a day?: "The point is, coffee has always been more than a beverage, and its health effects have always been controversial. After all, coffee is chock-full o' the drug 1,3,7-trimethylxanthine - better known as caffeine (even decaf has caf) - plus a wholelatte other chemicals and additives.
Recently, the buzz on brew has been good. Glug enough of it, research suggests, and you'll lower your risk of diabetes, liver cirrhosis, Parkinson's disease, gallstones and suicide. You'll also sprint better."

Senator Barrios, just what are those words to the Horst Wessel Lied again?

Backstory: Is it really just a bunch of Fluff? | csmonitor.com: "A tempest in a baggie blew through the Massachusetts State House in late June, when state Sen. Jarrett Barrios (D) attempted to censor the beloved but nutritionally vapid lunchtime staple. He did so after his son came home from school eating a 'Fluffernutter' sandwich: peanut butter and Marshmallow Fluff.
Mr. Barrios's amendment to a food nutrition bill would have regulated how often schools could serve Fluff to his children, and anyone else's. In retaliation, state Rep. Kathi-Anne Reinstein (D) sponsored a bill making Fluffernutter the state's official sandwich. Fluff, after all, is made by a Massachusetts firm - Lynn-based Durkee-Mower.
Fond of stories about oddball lawmakers, the media whipped the dispute into whitecaps, and Barrios found himself mired in a controversy that pun-happy pundits couldn't resist calling sticky.
In the end, Barrios backpedaled and never filed his amendment, and Ms. Reinstein's bill went nowhere. The result: Fluffgate - an end-of-school snit made from equal parts Cambridge liberal paternalism, local pride over a homegrown product, and garish politics - deflated like a marshmallow in the noontime sun.
The main casualty seems to have been the integrity of the Massachusetts legislature, a body some consider among the most cerebral in the nation, suddenly accused of playing nanny and not taking school nutrition seriously"

Reason: CleanFlicks v. Kate Winslet's Breasts: How Hollywood won a lawsuit while losing a cultural battle

Reason: CleanFlicks v. Kate Winslet's Breasts: How Hollywood won a lawsuit while losing a cultural battle

Protecting the Ports

Eternal truth of bureaucracy: it's more important, MUCH more important to be seen doing something than it is to ensure what you're doing is effective.
Quoth the mavens (yes, the emphasis is added):

SAN FRANCISCO, California, June 27, 2006 — A new study of U.S. seaport security delivers a message that leaders and citizens may not want to hear: Because there is no foolproof way to protect America’s ports from a terrorist attack, current policies and programs need to focus much more on recovery and economic restoration. In a report released today by the Public Policy Institute of California (PPIC), a team of economists and maritime security experts looks at an array of security issues to provide one of the most comprehensive examinations of port security to date.

Bottom line:

Measures would include continuing a “layered” defense whereby there are several tracking, screening, and inspection points for shipping containers as they flow from the foreign country’s factory gate, through the maritime domain, to U.S. shores; using multiple technologies such as radiation detectors and container tracking devices; steering government development of new technologies toward areas that the private sector has no incentive to pursue; strengthening emergency response at the nation’s ports; strengthening terrorism insurance markets; and reevaluating the level of overall port security funding and staffing for public entities that focus on port security, such as the U.S. Coast Guard.

The title is a link to the full article. Don't like that, use this: http://www.ppic.org/main/publication.asp?i=698

The penalty for bread and circuses

Starting today, states and localities have to recognize promised benefits as a cost. The result is a one t-as-in-tango trillion dollar liability. Here's how USA Today put it:
"Taxpayers will soon get a surprise bill that could exceed $1 trillion for the cost of paying future medical benefits for state and local workers who retire.
"Retiree medical costs are the biggest long-term challenge that state and local governments face."

This will, from the economically dunderheaded crowd, lead to calls for nationalized health care. Except the federal gov't's not in any better shape.
"The federal government also has a $2.3 trillion unfunded liability for medical and disability benefits promised to civil servants and military personnel who retire. The costs are not the nation's biggest financial problem. Medicare has a $33.4 trillion unfunded liability. Social Security has a $4.6 trillion shortfall."
That adds up to a 41.3 Trillion dollar unfunded requirement.
Well, no problems sayeth the dunderheads. The difference: the federal government can run a deficit. It sure can. Right up to the level of Argentina, which might be part of our future. Return with me now to one year ago today, when the Washington Post ran a column on the approaching bankruptcy of the USA
IN OTHER WORDS, for those of you who aren't dunderheads, forcing an additional few trillion bucks into the federal deficit only speeds the day of reckoning which a republican, a democrat, and the Comptroller warn about.
Observe this doesn't include any cost overruns from the 43rd President's drug plan.
Final note: Social Securty, which gets most of the attention, is actually a small problem compared unfunded medical problems.
Hat tip: Jane Galt
So, what does this have to do with Maritime Policy. Well, the US has some hard choices to make. When the cuts get made, will the maritime world emerge unscathed? Should it?

ColRegs Rule!

Yep, emphasis added.
APPEALS COURT THROWS OUT LOWER COURT “COLREGS SPECIAL CIRCUMSTANCES RULING”, CASE REMANDED
The US Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit ruled that agreed maneuvers between two ships do not constitute a special circumstance excusing violation of the nternational Regulations for Preventing Collisions at Sea (COLREGS), as previously determined by a lower court.
Crowley Marine Services, Inc. Owned and operated a tug boat hired to accompany an oil tanker operated by Maritrans Operating Company to an oil platform in the Puget Sound. During the crossing the two vessels collided, causing more than $2 million in damages.
In the inevitable suit that followed, each side identified numerous violations of the COLREGS as the alleged cause of the collision. The district court apportioned fault for the accident as 75% to Crowley and 25% to Maritrans.
The district court found that the two vessels were operating in concert according to agreed maneuvers, and therefore determined that several substantive provisions of the COLREGS at issue were inapplicable. Specifically, the court ruled that this situation presented “special circumstances” that provide an exception to the COLREGS. The Appeals Court held that the plain language of the COLREGS precludes such a broad exception, and remanded for the district court to reconsider the relative liability of the parties consistent with this opinion.
Text of the Appeals Court opinion may be obtained by emailing request to: cibpubs@earthlink.net.

Joint Malacca Patrols

From ONI: http://pollux.nss.nima.mil/onit/onit_j_main.html
STRAIT OF MALACCA: Joint sea and air patrols of the Strait of Malacca by Singapore, Malaysia, and Indonesia have been brought under a single umbrella. On 21 Apr, defense chiefs of the three countries signed an agreement to form a Joint Coordinating
Committee. The agreement sets out standard procedures for the joint sea and air patrols of the busy shipping lane which were launched last year (LL, LM).
Which is a polite way of saying the bad guys can't get away by crossing boundaries between nations and between national/international waters. 'S good news.

Paving the road to hell: USCG revising licensing certification legislation

Quoth the Admiral: "We did not intend to remove any rights, benefits or duties of credentialed merchant mariners. The Coast Guard will not make any immediate changes to the existing credentials or regulations solely because of this proposal. Instead, we plan to work with mariners, industry and the public through the rulemaking process."

Ze problem, you zee, iss thisss: the Ghost Kard neffer plans to putt der skrews to der mariner unless itz a crisis. Zo, ve vait for a crisis, no?

Read it all

A day of import, or yet another reason why I don't like this branch of the Republican party!

Quoth one of the 21st Century's noblest men: "Only a few economic historians are likely to notice June 17 marks the 75th anniversary of the signing of the Hawley-Smoot tariff bill, and even economic historians are unlikely to be nostalgic about that disastrous legislation.
snip
Who was opposed? Most of the leading economists. A Page One headline in the New York Times of May 5, 1930, read: '1,028 economists ask Hoover to veto pending tariff bill.' Those signing this public appeal against the new tariffs included many top economists -- 25 professors of economics at Harvard, 26 at the University of Chicago, and 28 at Columbia.
snip
The economists' appeal spelled it out: "The proponents of higher tariffs claim that the increase in rates will give work to the idle. This is not true. We cannot increase employment by restricting trade."
Yes, the emphasis is mine.

Read it all

Court ruling expected to change Canada's health care system - The Boston Globe - Boston.com - World - News

Court ruling expected to change Canada's health care system - The Boston Globe - Boston.com - World - News: "Canada's Supreme Court dealt a powerful blow to the state monopoly on health care yesterday, striking down a Quebec ban on private health insurance for services provided under the country's system of universal coverage."

Yee-hah! Of all the pernicious assertions during HillaryCare-of-unfond-memory's run through the public square, "We have a fine example right next door in Canada", is easily the silliest.

A bit more background. I'm a [US] Navy vet. The USN has major bases near the Canadian Border: Bremerton, WA and the soon-to-be closed Shipyard in Portsmouth, NH (actually, it's in Kittery, ME, but let that go). This means that Navy people are more likely than most to have been exposed to the Canadians traipsing across the border to receive treatment which the Canadian "fine example" often wouldn't provide, um, pre-mortem.

Note that the Canadian Supreme Court found that too: Socialized Medicine Kills.

The World Health Organization ranks Canada's health system 30th in the world and the United States 37th. France, which allows private services to complement its universal system, is ranked first.

Before, my fellow Liberals, you get too enthused about quoting this factoid, please check the premises of the WHO. Hint: they shot the arrow, then drew the target.

Official: Maritime NORAD Is 'Defense In Depth'

aviation week, aerospace, airline industry, space technology, defense, aircraft, homeland security, articles, magazines, FAA, regulations, news: "06/14/2005 09:24:13 AM
By Michael Bruno
Maritime defense - including the creation of a maritime equivalent of the North American Aerospace Defense Command - presents the greatest single opportunity to beef up domestic security, according to the Defense Department's top official for homeland defense. "

The right to self-defense trumps the right of an employer to fire an at-will employee

The Volokh Conspiracy - -
I don't usually approve of lawyers interfering with private contracts; however, unless this guys agreement with 7-11 specifically said "thou shalt not interfere with a store robbery, even if failure to act will get you killed" and the employee knowledgeably signed the agreement, I think the courts got it right.

BP's fleet moves aimed at reducing risk of spills

From the Houston Chronicle:"BP is urging shipowners to meet tougher health and safety standards for their tankers, seeking to minimize the risk of an oil spill."Read it all

Presumably, BP will be somewhat more level headed than some regulatory agencies which I won't bother to name. Let's think analysis, risk-management, effectiveness...

Semester at sea operators sue University of Pittsburgh

UNIVERSITY AND SHIP OPERATORS CLASH ON ROGUE WAVE INCIDENT

A legal clash between the University of Pittsburgh and the operators of the Semester-at-Sea educational program over a rouge wave rolled into a Pennsylvania courtroom earlier this week. The Semester at Sea operators had launched a lawsuit against the university over the school's removal of its 24-year sponsorship. In defending its decision to abandon the cruise-based educational experience, the university cited substantial damage sustained to the EXPLORER in January when a rouge wave hit the ship during a storm off the US Pacific Northwest.

The university asserts that the school is concerned for student safety. On the other hand, the Semester-at-Sea operators counter that the program's vessels are as safe as any afloat and have been made even safer since the big wave hit the ship. That incident left the EXPLORER adrift for awhile in heavy seas. Preparing to begin this summer's voyage on June 17 from Halifax in Nova Scotia, the ship will have students from over 200 campuses aboard. It will boast reinforced bridge windows and an improved control system, and will avoid the area of the Pacific where the incident occurred. =

End of the day: would I permit my kids to sail on this ship? Answer: yes.

Something I didn't know from the LA Times: Who's Really Abusing the Koran?

Who's Really Abusing the Koran?: "All the headlines about 'Abuse of the Koran at Gitmo' are absolutely accurate. Brig. Gen. Jay Hood's internal investigation has uncovered some shocking incidents. On at least six occasions, Korans were ripped up. They were urinated on three times, and attempts were made to flush them down the toilet at least three other times.

Why aren't millions of Muslims rioting in response to these defilements? Because the perpetrators were prisoners, not guards. As John Hinderaker notes on weeklystandard.com, the most serious desecrations of the Koran at the Guantanamo Bay detention facility were committed by the Muslim inmates themselves."

SHIPPING COORDINATING COMMITTEE TO MEET IN PREPARATION OF IMO MEETING

The Shipping Coordinating Committee (SHC) will conduct an open meeting at 9:30 a.m. on Tuesday, June 14, 2005, in Room 1303 of the United States Coast Guard Headquarters building, 2100 Second Street SW., Washington, DC 20593-0001. The primary purpose of the meeting is to prepare for the thirty-second session of the Facilitation Committee (FAL 32) of the International Maritime Organization (IMO), to be held from July 4 to 8, 2005, at IMO Headquarters in London, England.
The primary matters for discussion for FAL 32 will include the following:
* Convention on Facilitation of International Maritime Traffic.
* Consideration and adoption of proposed amendments to the Annex to the Convention.
* Electronic means for the clearance of ships.
* Application of the Committee's Guidelines.
* General review of the Convention including harmonization with other international instruments.
* Prevention and suppression of unlawful acts at sea or in port--Facilitation aspects.
* Prevention and control of illicit drug trafficking--Facilitation aspects.
* Measure to enhance maritime security--Facilitation aspects.
* Measures and procedures for the treatment of people rescued at sea--Facilitation aspects.
* Ship/port interface.
* Formalities connected with the arrival, stay and departure of ships.
* Formalities connected with the arrival, stay and departure of persons--Stowaways.
* Facilitation aspects of other IMO forms and certificates.
* Technical cooperation sub-program for facilitation.
Copies of documents associated with FAL 32 will not be available at this meeting. Documents will be available in Adobe Acrobat format on CD-ROM. To request documents, please contact David Du Pont via e-mail at DDuPont@comdt.uscg.mil or write to the address provided below.
Members of the public may attend this meeting up to the seating capacity of the room. Interested persons may seek information by writing to David Du Pont, Commandant (G-MSR), U.S. Coast Guard Headquarters, 2100 Second Street SW., Room 1400, Washington, DC 20593-0001 or by calling (202) 267-0971.

The IMO, from whence mischief comes.

A WWII Merchant Marine (or, if you prefer, Merchant Navy) Vet on Maritime day

"Even though it's not formally celebrated until Monday, Sunday is National Maritime Day.

It has become the most ignored national day, memorializing the country's most forgotten historical event and honoring the most ignored element of its military structure, the U.S. merchant marine.

Congress adopted the resolution creating the day on May 20, 1933, taking note of May 22, 1819, the day the steamer Savannah sailed from its home port on the first successful transoceanic voyage by steamship. President Franklin Roosevelt issued the proclamation.

Every succeeding president proclaimed it, and every succeeding generation ignored it.

It was easy to remember winning World War II but easy to forget the merchant marine, the logistical miracle that enabled the victory.

The merchant marine story is all about lessons learned on the cruel seas, of scandalous political treatment of its sailors after the war, of long-fought battles for recognition as veterans, and of a commitment as deep, and a risk at least as high, as any soldier's on any battlefield.

But the merchant marine was invisible."

Despite Mr. Felknor's ignorance of six of the seven maritime academies, you should read it all:Chicago Tribune | THE MERCHANT MARINE:

Base Realignment and Closure 2005 - BRAC (a/k/a BRAAAAKKKKKK)

Me auld stomping grounds in N'awlinz are on the chopping block. Back in the mists of time the Naval Air Reserve and Naval Surface Reserve were combined into a single HQ and moved to the congressional district of -- SURPRISE! -- Hale Boggs, Chairman of the House Armed Services Committee. BRAC will move Naval Reserve Forces Command (a/k/a Naval Reserve HQ) to Norfolk -- which is were the Fleet Forces Command hangs out.

Read it all:
Base Realignment and Closure 2005 - U.S. Department of Defense

WORLDWIDE THREAT TO SHIPPING (WWTTS)

OFFICE OF NAVAL INTELLIGENCE
CIVIL MARITIME ANALYSIS DEPARTMENT
WORLDWIDE THREAT TO SHIPPING
MARINER WARNING INFORMATION
--SNIP--
This Worldwide Threat to Shipping Report is ... also posted at the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency site
http://pollux.nss.nima.mil/onit/onit_j_main.html.

SENATE COMMERCE COMMITTEE TO HOLD HEARING ON PORT SECURITY

Yahoo! Mail - rgmcf@yahoo.com

A Mexican blueprint to rival US ports

"The driving force behind the proposal is the 'surprising and consistent' growth in Asian maritime cargo to North America, Mr Roel said."

The driving force behind this proposal might have just a little to do with the inability of western US ports to unclog themselves or to guarantee labor peace. Just possibly.

Anti-piracy current developments

1. STRAITS OF MALACCA: A 28 Apr Singapore press report states Indonesia and Singapore have agreed to step up efforts to protect the pirate infested Straits of Malacca through coordinated joint patrols of the waterways. Both sides have agreed to reaffirm their commitment to improve the safety of the waterway that borders
Malaysia, Singapore, and Indonesia.

A 26 Apr Malaysian press report states the Malaysian Navy wants all merchant ships that pass through the Straits of Malacca to use channel 6 to safeguard themselves from pirate attacks. A Malaysian Navy public relations officer explained the channel is to facilitate communications of merchant ships when entering the Straits of Malacca. He goes on to explain vessels need to provide their location to make monitoring easier for the military and that the use of channel 6 had been negotiated with the Singaporean and Indonesian
military (Local Media reports).

2. ASIA: The first four countries have signed the Japanese led Regional Cooperation Agreement on Combating Piracy and Armed Robbery Against Ships in Asia (ReCAAP) per 04 May message. Singapore, Cambodia, and Laos joined Japan last week in signing the ReCAAP agreement. The ReCAAP plans to establish and operate an Information Sharing Center, to be located in Singapore, with the goal of facilitating communication and information exchanges between the member countries, as well as improve the quality of statistics and reports on piracy and armed robbery
against ships in the region. The ReCAAP agreement also seeks to enhance capabilities of member countries to combat piracy and will enter into force 90 days after the 10th country signs up (LL).

The few, the proud, the ... Towing Safety Advisory Committee? TSAC?

COAST GUARD SEEKING APPLICATIONS FOR TSAC
The Coast Guard is seeking applications for membership on the Towing Safety Advisory Committee (TSAC). TSAC advises the Coast Guard on matters relating to shallow-draft inland and coastal waterway navigation and towing safety.
Application forms should reach us on or before May 27, 2005
You may request an application form by writing to
Commandant (G-MSO-1)
U.S. Coast Guard
2100 Second Street, SW.
Washington, DC 20593-0001
Or you may call (202) 267-0214; or fax (202) 267-4570.
Send your original completed and signed application in written form to the above street address. This notice is available on the Internet at
http://dms.dot.gov in docket USCG-2005-21002
and the application form is also available at
http://www.uscg.mil/hq/g-m/advisory/index.htm (click on “ACM Application'').
For further information contact: Mr. Gerald Miante; Assistant Executive Director of TSAC, telephone (202)267-0214, fax (202) 267-4570, or e-mail gmiante@comdt.uscg.mil.

TSAC SETS MEETING FOR MAY 4-5

TSAC SETS MEETING FOR MAY 4-5
The Towing Vessel Inspection Working Group of the Towing Safety Advisory Committee (TSAC) will meet to discuss matters relating to specific issues of towing safety. The meetings will be open to the public.
The Towing Vessel Inspection Working Group will meet on Wednesday, May 4, 2005 from 1:30 p.m. to 4:30 p.m. and on Thursday, May 5, 2005 from 8:30 a.m. to 2 p.m. The meetings may close early if all business is finished.
Written material and requests to make oral presentations should reach the Coast Guard on or before April 27, 2005. Requests to have a copy of your material distributed to each member of the Working Group should reach the Coast
Guard on or before April 27, 2005.
The Working Group will meet at the Arlington Hilton, 950 North Stafford Street, Arlington, VA 22203. Send written material and requests to make oral presentations to Mr. Gerald Miante, Commandant (G-MSO-1), U.S. Coast Guard Headquarters, 2100 Second Street SW., Washington, DC 20593-0001. This notice and related documents are
available on the Internet at
http://dms.dot.gov under the docket number USCG-2005-21001.
For further information contact: Mr. Gerald Miante, Assistant Executive Director of TSAC, telephone 202-267-0214, fax 202-267-4570, or e-mail gmiante@comdt.uscg.mil.

Our brethern shield in danger's hour...

MARAD - Welcome to U.S. Maritime Administration
From John Jamian, Acting Maritime Administrator:
Memorial Day National Moment of Remembrance

As Acting Maritime Administrator, I encourage you to participate in the National Moment of Remembrance, taking one minute at 3:00 p.m. local time on Memorial Day, Monday, May 30, to remember the sacrifices of America’s fallen, from the Revolutionary War to the present. This honors not only members of the Armed Services, but also the U.S. Merchant Marine and other civilians whose devotion has preserved and defended our heritage of freedom. Yes, I emphasized "Merchant Marine."

To which we append, amen.

What the hell's the ITF

MarEx Newsletter: "
ITF Gains Ten Percent Pay Increase for Seamen
On January 1, 2006, 'able seamen' will receive a rate increase of $1,550 per month, which equates to a ten percent increase. The concept of this benchmark increase was opposed by many shipowners who argue that there should not be a globally applied wage because of the socio-economic conditions in their home countries, most of whom come from developing areas. "
"ITF" is International Trade Federation, a critter of the United Nations. This wage raise has the effect of forcing 'just-barely-satisfactory' shipowners into the ranks of the unsatisfactory shipowners. Further, like all minimum wage schemes, it reduces hiring -- especially from the desparately improverished areas of the world.
BUT, this action completely fulfils the bureaucratic imperative: it's much more important to be seen doing something than it is to do something effective.

Go ahead, make my day....

Press report describes a private security firm providing armed escorts through the Straits of Malacca, 08 Apr. The Singapore based Background Asia Risk Solutions has its own armor plated vessel that accompanies boats anywhere between Sri Lanka and the South China Sea for around 50,000 US dollars a mission. The firm was established nine months ago and reports having provided 12 escort missions. The firm’s boat has yet to engage in any combat with pirates but states they have warned off several suspicious vessels by using loud hailers, flares, and spotlights.

Pound to a ruble, the retromingent pithecoids of the surrounding nations will try and put a stop to this. They won't protect the ships, but they will protect their sternframes.

Source: Informa Group, formerly LLP, Llp Limited, London

Billion bucks of floating steel

Kvaerner Philadelphia Shipyard, Formerly Facing Closure, Signs $1 Billion Double-Hulled Tanker Deal;
OSG, Inc. agrees to long-term charter.
Former President Bill Clinton Delivers Keynote Remarks At Shipyard
Oh, yeah. The kind of people that buy/borrow/operate tankers are likely to be really impressed by the running mate of the author of Earth in the Balance.

The team that rescued Kvaerner’s Philadelphia Shipyard (KPSI) from closure in 2001 today announced a $1 Billion, 10 double-hulled tanker deal and the formation of a new wholly-owned, U.S.-based subsidiary that will charter the environmentally-sound ships in the growing Jones Act domestic shipping market. The ships will be chartered for at least five years at a cost of more than $500 Million after delivery to Overseas Shipholding Group, Inc. (NYSE:OSG) for service in the Jones Act domestic shipping market.
A ceremonial contract-signing was held in the heart of the shipyard along the Delaware River. It was attended by more than 1,000 workers, customers, suppliers, and friends of the Yard, including former President Bill Clinton, who served as the keynote speaker. He signed into law the 1993 National Shipbuilding Initiative that mightily helped a struggling American maritime industry through streamlining regulations and a $220 million new technology support package. President Clinton said he was proud to play a role in the successful, bi-partisan public-private partnership that set the stage for the shipyard revitalization.“I never lost faith in the American shipbuilding industry and neither did so many of our public servants, workers and private businesses,” said President Clinton. “I salute the men and women of Kvaerner Philadelphia Shipyard for showing all of us once again that it is possible to achieve great things even in the face of seemingly impossible odds. Today’s announcement is good news for the workers here, for America’s maritime industry and for the environment.” On the site of America’s first naval base, completely rebuilt by Kvaerner to world-class specifications, company officials were also joined by Gov. Ed Rendell, Mayor John F. Street, U.S. Representative Curt Weldon, and numerous other local, state, and federal government officials who came together under the red-white-and-blue banner, “Building the Future”. There were several major positive announcements for the region and America’s commercial shipbuilding industry. These included:• Kick off a new, five-year, 10-ship (plus an option for two additional vessels), $1 Billion Product Tanker Program, believed to be the largest of its kind in American commercial shipbuilding. KPSI will build efficient, cleaner-burning, environmentally sound double-hulled tankers for the domestic Jones Act market. The leading-edge ship design is being provided through an exclusive, five-year agreement with Hyundai Mipo Dockyard. The order, which includes an option for two additional tankers, calls for the fist delivery in 2006 and order completion by 2010. • Formation of ASC (American Shipping, Inc.) as part of Kvaerner ASA, which will in turn own KPSI and charter the new tankers to domestic customers, including major oil and chemical producers and suppliers. Brad Mulholland, the former President of Matson Navigation Company, Inc is serving as CEO of the new subsidiary. He said the new, MT-46 Veteran Class, 46,000 dwt tankers will be among the most efficient tankers ever built• ASC’s first new customer, pending the approval of both company boards of directors, is OSG, the second largest publicly listed tanker owner in the world (measured by number of vessels.) Its fleet totals 99 and with this charter, it would be doubling the size of its Jones Act fleet. • News that the turnaround initiated in December 2001, under Kvaerner’s new management, headed by Mr. Røkke, is succeeding. He rebuked previous management plans to close the yard and focused significant energy and resources on building a stable future supported by steadily increasing efficiency and productivity, KPSI recently declared its first annual profit for calendar year 2004 It has sold its first four ships to Matson with two ships in service and reporting excellent results. The next KPSI-built Matson container vessel is scheduled to be christened May 21.• Start of construction of a new permanent office building on the KPSI site replacing temporary trailer offices the company has occupied since acquiring the facility in 1997. This is another tangible sign that KPSI is “here and here to stay.”Mr. Røkke, the self-made industrialist who believed from the outset that the Philadelphia yard could aggressively compete in the Jones Act market, thanked President Clinton for his contributions to the American maritime industry and to the health and safety of the world. He praised the shipyard’s tireless supporters and the dedication and determination of shipyard workers and the job they are doing to make Kvaerner Philadelphia a more efficient – and profitable – business.“I am proud to be able to show how well the people at the yard have stood up to the challenge of turning this Navy yard into the most competitive yard in the Jones Act market”, he said. “Based on the foundation of bold political decisions in the 1990s, a committed work force now produces great ships, built efficiently and with love and care. I lived and worked in the United States for 15 years, and I know this is a can-do country. We have proven that we are the can-do shipyard in the United States.”Gov. Rendell, who as Mayor of Philadelphia, helped attract Kvaerner to the city and forge a landmark public-private economic development partnership said, “Thousands of jobs have been created and are continuing to be created through our joint efforts. With the help of so many elected officials, including my predecessor, Gov. Ridge, and countless others, Kvaerner Philadelphia stands as a model to the rest of America of how you can transform a former military base into a successful major employer and economic engine that benefits not just one region, but an entire nation.”The Governor noted that more than 140 KPSI workers were rehired and retrained after they lost their jobs in the Naval Shipyard closing.“The proposed bareboat charters of ten newbuild Jones Act product tankers by subsidiaries of OSG represent a significant commitment,” said Morten Arntzen, President & CEO of OSG. “For the Jones Act fleet to grow, it will require yards like KPSI and shipping companies like OSG that are committed to quality and willing to think and act creatively and boldly. The ten ship program is OSG’s first giant step to building a world-class U.S. flag shipping business.”David Meehan, Kvaerner Philadelphia’s CEO, and a Pennsylvania native, said, “This is a proud moment for us as a company that is building the highest quality ships our nation’s maritime economy depends on”. He said while performance and productivity are continually improving, the KPSI team recognizes they are in a fiercely competitive market place. “In this business you are only as good as the next ship you build so we strive for continuous improvement in every area, from productivity to profitability.” Meehan also noted that the new fleet of tankers meets the international standards for double-hulled tankers which must be in service by 2015, replacing an aging fleet of single-hulled tankers. He said the disastrous crude oil spill from a single-hull tanker in the Delaware River last year is a stark reminder to his team of the vital need for their new ships.He also praised the contributions of Manny Stamatakis, the former Chair of the Delaware River Port Corporation (DRPA), and now Chair of the Philadelphia Shipyard Development Corporation (PSDC) and others who have worked to preserve and promote the highest standards of shipbuilding at the Kvaerner yard. About Kjell Inge RøkkeMr. Rokke, the Main Shareholder of Kvaerner ASA, is an entrepreneur, an industrialist, and an internationalist. His career in business began in 1982 in Seattle, Washington, with the purchase of a fishing trawler and that led to his building a network of leading worldwide fisheries. A builder of businesses in diverse sectors, ranging from shipbuilding to materials handling, he has invested significantly in the United States and Norway. His business interests include the Aker Group, Norway’s largest employer in the private sector and Kvaerner, the parent company of both KPSI and newly-formed ASC. The Aker Group is a global technology and service provider to the oil, gas energy and process industries, the fifth largest shipbuilding group in the world, and one of Europe’s leading providers of fresh fish to consumer markets.

© Kværner ASA - Fjordallèen 16, P.O.Box 1423 Vika, N-0115 OSLO, Tel +47 24 13 00 00 Disclaimer

Another eternal truth unveiled

Quoted in Government Computer News:
Senator Richard Shelby: "Given the amount of information agencies collect, [having] Chief Privacy Officers makes sense."
Congresscritter Tom Davis: "The Shelby legislation contradicts existing infomation policy currently executed by the CIOs."

Eternal Truth: The validity of a statement is inversely proportional to the amount of bureaucratese in the statement.

Pirates sail Indonesian seas after tsunami

The pirates, believed by analysts to be part of a northern Indonesian crime syndicate, emerged just after operations wound down by more than a dozen foreign navies deployed to Indonesia's northern Aceh province at the peak of the tsunami relief effort.
The good old days when pirates were hung by the first law enforcement agency to lay their hands on them are, alas, gone.
A string of bold attacks by armed bandits in the Malacca Strait is stoking fears of a new wave of sea piracy in one of the world's busiest waterways, fueled by desperation in tsunami-ravaged northern Indonesia.

The three attacks in two weeks bore the trademark style of pirates who have stalked the strait for decades: grappling hooks were hurled as the bandits clambered aboard, abducting crew at gun point and then vanishing in speedboats, demanding ransom.

"It's going to get worse because the money from piracy is so good," said the managing director of a Singapore shipping company whose ships have been ransacked by bandits in the past and who has negotiated with pirates for the release of abducted crew.

"All they have to do is pirate three or four vessels a month. Each averages about $100,000 for them, so they can bring about $4 million a year. That's a lot of money and they can well afford to pay people off," said the shipper, who declined to be identified.

The latest hits were bolder than most of the attacks of 2004 and shattered two months' of peace in the strait, through which pass about a quarter of global trade and nearly all oil imports for Japan and China, since the Dec. 26 Indian Ocean tsunami.

"Clearly the tsunami effect was to stop activity but now it's resuming and it's mainly criminal elements based on the east coast of Indonesia," said Clive Williams of the Strategic and Defense Studies Center at the Australian National University.

Three attacks in two weeks
The International Maritime Bureau's Southeast Asian piracy reporting center in Malaysia got first word of the attacks on Feb. 28 when bandits wielding machine guns ransacked a tugboat in Malaysian waters and shot its chief engineer in the leg before abducting its captain and chief officer for ransom.

Twelve days later, gunmen armed with rocket launchers stormed a fully laden chemical tanker, briefly taking control of the ship before making off with the captain and chief engineer. They were held until a ransom was paid, a regional maritime official said. Within 48 hours, 10 bandits speaking in an Indonesian dialect fired at a Japanese tugboat before boarding the ship in northern Malaysia and abducting two Japanese crew and a Filipino. They were later freed after an apparent ransom was paid.
© EITB24 - 2005

David Shirlaw
Editor SeaWaves Magazine
http://www.blogger.com/www.seawaves.com
(TEL) 604-924-5401 (FAX) 604-924-5403

USCG PROPOSING TO MAKE PERMANENT ’94 SUSPENSION OF THE CRASH STOP REQUIREMENTS IN TANKER ESCORT RULES

The Coast Guard is proposing to make permanent the 1994 suspension of their crash stop requirements in tanker escort rules. Comments and related material must reach the Docket Management Facility on or before June 27, 2005. You may submit comments identified by Coast Guard docket number USCG-2003-14734 to the Docket Management Facility at the U.S. Department of Transportation. To avoid duplication, please use only one of the following methods:
(1) Website: http://dms.dot.gov.
(2) Mail: Docket Management Facility, U.S. Department of Transportation, 400 Seventh Street, SW., Washington, DC 20590-0001.
(3) Fax: (202) 493-2251.
(4) Delivery: Room PL-401 on the Plaza level of the Nassif Building, 400 Seventh Street, SW., Washington, DC, between 9 a.m. and 5 p.m., Monday through Friday, except Federal holidays. The telephone number is (202) 366-9329.
(5) Federal eRulemaking Portal: http://www.regulations.gov.
If you have questions on this proposed rule, call Lieutenant Sam Stevens, G-MSE-1, telephone (202) 267-0173, e-mail: SStevens@comdt.uscg.mil. If you have questions on viewing or submitting material to the docket, call Ms. Andrea M. Jenkins, Program Manager, Docket Operations, telephone (202) 366-0271.
SUPPLEMENTARY INFORMATION:
Public Participation and Request for Comments We encourage you to participate in this rulemaking by submitting comments and related materials. All comments received will be posted, without change, to http://dms.dot.gov and will include any personal information you have provided. We have an agreement with the Department of Transportation (DOT) to use the Docket Management Facility. Please see DOT's ``Privacy Act'' paragraph below.
Submitting comments: If you submit a comment, please include your name and address, identify the docket number for this rulemaking (USCG-2003-14734), indicate the specific section of this document to which each comment applies, and give the reason for each comment. You may submit your comments and material by electronic means, mail, fax, or delivery to the Docket Management Facility at the address under ADDRESSES; but please submit your comments and material by only one means. If you submit them by mail or delivery, submit them in an unbound format, no larger than 8\1/2\ by 11 inches, suitable for copying and electronic filing. If you submit them by mail and would like to know that they reached the Facility, please enclose a stamped, self-addressed postcard or envelope. We will consider all comments and material received during the comment period. We may change this proposed rule in view of them.
Viewing comments and documents: To view comments, as well as documents mentioned in this preamble as being available in the docket, go to http://dms.dot.gov at any time and conduct a simple search using the docket number. You may also visit the Docket Management Facility in room PL-401 on the Plaza level of the Nassif Building, 400 Seventh Street SW., Washington, DC, between 9 a.m. and 5 p.m., Monday through Friday, except Federal holidays.
Background
This rulemaking addresses ``unfinished business'' from 1994. In 1994, we published the final rule entitled Escort Vessels for Certain Tankers under docket number CGD 91-202, which adopted 33 CFR part 168 (57 FR 30058, Aug. 19, 1994). The rule drew on a study to determine the capabilities of escort vessels to control disabled tankers. The study was published in two parts (59 FR 1411, Jan. 10, 1994; 60 FR 6345, Feb. 1, 1995). Preliminary data for the second study became available after publication of the final rule, but before the rule took effect. This preliminary data indicated that it might be dangerous to implement the final rule's crash stop provision, 33 CFR 168.50(b)(2). Therefore, on November 1, 1994 (59 FR 54519), we suspended the crash stop provision before it could take effect with the other provisions of part 168. No further action was taken with respect to the crash stop provision, and it remains suspended today.
As long as the crash stop provision's suspension remains in effect, we must continue to report the CGD 91-202 rulemaking on the Uniform Regulatory Agenda of the United States, the Federal Government's official list of ongoing regulatory projects. CGD 91-202 appears in the most recent edition of the Agenda at 69 FR 73240 (Dec. 13, 2004). Twice each year, the Coast Guard spends valuable administrative time maintaining its Uniform Regulatory Agenda reports, whether or not a reported project is active.
For the reasons given under “Removal of Crash Stop Provision,” the Coast Guard maintains the position it first adopted in 1994, that the crash stop provision should not be implemented. Therefore, it is the Coast Guard position that the crash stop provision's 1994 suspension should be made permanent, thereby allowing us to complete the CGD 91-202 rulemaking.
Since 1998, the Coast Guard has used the Department of Transportation's Docket Management System (DMS) to make its rulemaking documents widely available to the public. DMS assigns unique docket numbers to each rulemaking, and the format of those docket numbers is not compatible with the Coast Guard's pre-1998 conventions for numbering dockets. Therefore, if we are ever to complete CGD 91-202 in a way that makes our actions visible to the public through DMS, we must complete it under a new, DMS-compatible docket number. For that reason, we opened the current rulemaking under DMS docket number USCG-2003-14734. In essence, when we complete USCG-2003-14734, we will also complete CGD 91-202.

Beware the bite of a chained dog!

Journal of Commerce -- March 25, 2005
Mariners victims of new rules: SCI
New anti-terror and environmental regulations are increasingly treating today's merchant seamen like pirates, said Douglas Stevenson, director of the Center for Seafarer 's Rights of New York and New Jersey, an arm of the Seamen's Church Institute.
Let us repeat the mantra of the bureaucrat:
"It is more important to be seen doing something than it is to do something effective."
Stevenson, a retired U.S. Coast Guard commander, said foreign crews are being kept in the United States, sometimes in jail, because they were on board ships (schedules) when an accident occurred that spilled oil, the Connecticut Post reported.
They're being held as material witnesses to pollution crimes," he said during a shipping conference in Stamford, Conn., and that in at least one California case, a crew was actually shackled by federal marshals and kept in jail.

Assuming God made lawyers, this is what God made lawyers for: when you're dealing with an agency that's Judge, Jury, and Executioner, you should have a mantra of your own: "Talk to my lawyer."

Of note: at a meeting sponsored, in part, by the Coast Guard, a maritime attorney said much the same thing.

Stevenson also said security companies are charging seafarers exorbitant fees in order to gain access to land facilities in ports under new security regulations.

Oh, Damn. Another E-quake off Indonesia

8.2 according to the USGS

US NAVY REORGANIZATION

The maritime world, especially the policy world, may love the Navy or not but may not ignore.
From Power and Control:
"The Cold War model designed in response to the needs of the Cold War and the lessons learned from the Pearl Harbor attack was to have 1/3 of the ships deployed, 1/3 being refitted, and 1/3 training for deployment. This was designed to prevent a sneak attack from destroying our Navy while at the same time giving the sailors enough time at home to maintain a semblance of family life for career officers and enlisted."

From the Defense Industry Daily

The Ghost Fleet

A bit of background: until the 90s, obsolete ships, including government-owned ships, were 'broken' or scrapped at foreign yards, frequently in the third world. Environmental and worker safety standards were [are] somewhat lacking. The social safety net, however, is almost nonexistant. A Bangladeshi who is not working doesn't receive unemployment protection.

The government agency responsible for scrapping these ships is the Maritime Administration. MARAD was required by law to get best value for scrapped ships; therefore, almost all of them went overseas.

That's changed now. Read it here.

Seattle Post-Intelligencer, meathead

They're all a-flutter:
A Seattle Post-Intelligencer investigation found disturbing evidence that efforts to reduce crew work hours, crack down on alcohol use and improve tug escorts are being evaded or undermined.
All along the West Coast -- from Prince William Sound to Puget Sound, to San Francisco to Long Beach -- state and federal regulators are taking steps to reduce requirements for tug escorts.

Radical thought: has anyone checked out how much good tug escorts do? Maybe, just maybe, they're (another) example of the eternal truth of bureaucracy: "It's more important to be seen doing something than it is to do something effective."

Money shot (in the ninth paragraph):
While the amount of oil spilled from tankers has declined sharply in recent years...

Yeah, Yeah?

environmentalists point out that just one catastrophic accident would reverse those numbers.

Not just environmentalists, Chucklehead. Pay attention now, this requires advanced mathematics like addition and subtraction of which [even] journalism majors have heard:
Any major accident will put a lot of oil in the water. That's because the ships are so big. Don't want big ships? Then you do want $5.00/gallon gasoline.

Incidentally, the linked article includes a graph of oil spills. Conspicuously missing is a trend line -- which would show the amount of oil decreasing.

It would be very easy to say this is an example of anti-free-enterprise conspiracies in the press corps, and I'd love to say so. Unfortunately, I'm afraid, the answer's more mundane. Journalists, having the mathematical skills of the typical third grader -- I intend no offense to third graders -- I suspect they person/persons involved don't know what a trend line is, much less its importance.

There's a reason why a journaism degree is a BJ!

Merchant Mariners on the Haggis

You unfortunate creatures who've not met him before should know that Mr. Colin Glencannon is Chief Engineer of Ye Goode Shippe Inchcliffe Castle, Mr. MacQuayle is the Second Resistant Engineer and Mr. Mongomery -- obviously of English Descent -- is the Chief Mate. Their doing were chronicled by one Mr Guy Gilpatrick in the old, 'scuse me, auld Saturday Evening Post.

The Making of the Haggis - Edward Quaintance "The Hunting of the Haggis" Glencannon Afloat, in the Second Glencannon Omnibus by Guy Gilpatrick, Dodd, Meade & Company, New York, 1944, pp 215 - 221

Glencannon: "...the haggis is the fruit o' a romonce o' lang, lang ago, involving the humble pudding and the lordly sossage. It is the culinary triumph o' Scotland, which is to say, o' the entire world! ...oatmeal, onions, and pepper, is that orl there is to it? ...weel, proctically, though in enumerating the ingredients, ye left oot the five-gallon bucket. But once ye've got those four succulent essentials ready at hond, yere haggis is as good as made. All that remains to do, then, is slaughter an ox, ...

MacQuayle: "Not an ox--a sheep! Ye commence by chopping his head off. My Auntie Meg in Killiecrankie always did the job with an auld claymore ... till the rheumatism cromped her style. After that, she'd sneak up on him through the heather and bosh him ower the head with a rock. While the sheep would be laying there groggy, she'd sit hersel' astroddle o' him with a cross-cut saw and ...

Glencannon: "Pairdon, me, ox! Ye hong up yere ox and ye let his bluid drain into the five-gallon bucket. His stoomach, his liver, his heart and all his heavier machinery ye put carefully to one side where the collies canna snotch them. ... Ye take all the parts ye dinna plon to use for glue except the stoomach. Ye hash them up. Ye mix them with yere oatmeal, yere onions and yere pepper. Then ye throw the whole business into the five-gallon bucket, soshing it aroond with a broom hondle or a guid, stoot walking stick until it gives off a scupping sound, lik' when ye wade through the ooze in the botton o' a dry dock. At this point, if ye care to, ye can add a sprig o' pursely and a few leaves o' rosemary, gently crushed betwixt the finger and the thumb, although discriminating haggis eaters o' the auld school maintain that this detrocts from the soobtile and deelicate flavor o' the whole.

Montgomery: "Ugh! Me, I'd add some disinfectant and 'eave the 'ole mess overboard! ... Yus, gorblyme, and I'd 'eave the bucket arfter it!

Glencannon: "...pairmit me to obsairve that I think ye're vurra uncouth. ... (then) ye cook it to a turn, for that, incidentally, ye must use a fire. But feerst ye pick up the ox's stoomach in yere left hond, grosping it firmly aroond the waistline, as in the auld-fashioned Viennese waltz. Then, with yere richt, ye stoof it full o' the stoof ye fish oot o' the five-gallon bucket... Do ye check wi' me, Muster MacQuayle?

MacQuayle: "Dom, no, by no means! Ye dinna stoof the stoofing into an ox's stoomach at all; ye stoof it into a sheep's liver!

Montgomery: "I don't think either of you two Scotch cannibals 'ave got the foggiest notion of 'ow to make yer 'orrid 'aggis..."

On the Water: Smithsonian exhibit in 2008

UNPARALLELED OPPORTUNITY FOR THE MARITIME INDUSTRY
The Smithsonian Institution in Washington D.C., which is visited by millions of Americans each year, and in a recent Harris Brand-Quality survey was ranked No. 1 in reach and quality in the world, is planning a new public exhibition, On the Water: Stories from Maritime America. Opening is anticipated in 2008.
This major exhibition, together with a website and a teachers’ package that will be distributed nationally, will highlight the all-important maritime influence in American history and then bring that great story right up to the 21st century. Our country began as a maritime nation, and – today – our economy depends on our maritime connections.
Few modern Americans appreciate any of this vital history or realize our critical dependence on maritime commerce. For those who appreciate the history of the sea and want that story told publicly and in a highly visible way, On the Water presents an unparalleled opportunity. Ever since the 1980s, all exhibitions and programs at the
Smithsonian have depended on private support, and On the Water is no different. Only the maritime industry can make this project happen.
On the Water will be on view for a minimum of 20 years, in the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History, on the National Mall between the Capitol and the White House.
The museum receives 5 million visitors a year, and 7 to 10 million across America access the museum’s exhibitions each year in classrooms and at home computers.
On the Water will cover 8,000 square feet and is organized chronologically into seven sections, from the 17th Century to the beginning of the 21st: “The Atlantic World,” “Maritime Nation,” “Harvesting the Sea,” “Inland Waterways,” “Crossing Oceans,” “Answering the Call,” and “Modern Maritime America.” Project director Paula
Johnson says that more than 200 artifacts, 300 graphics, and many interactive video components are included. In addition, “virtual field trips” – electronically connecting classrooms with real-life maritime experiences – are also planned.
Brand quality is always of interest, and the Smithsonian’s is next to none: Reflecting the Smithsonian’s reach and value to Americans, a 2003 Harris Brand Quality survey of 1,152 world-class brands found that the Smithsonian ranked No. 1 overall in public perception.
For more information about On the Water, contact either Paula Johnson, Project Director, at 202.633.3908 and or Bill Withuhn, at 202.633.1919 and