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Tunku Varadajan says if the world community wants to punish Putin, they could yank the 2018 Soccer world cup from Russia and award it to the Netherlands.
In the wake of the MH17 disaster, the world needs to make Vladimir Putin’s pride—not the Russian people—pay. And a good first step would be to stop pretending sport is politically neutral.
Days after Malaysia Airlines flight MH17 was shot down over eastern Ukraine, killing all passengers and crew aboard, the world is contending with a fiendishly difficult question: What is the appropriate punitive response to this atrocity?
The civilian airliner was destroyed with a ground-to-air missile of Russian provenance, fired either by Russia-backed separatists or by the Russian military. Moral and political responsibility for the slaughter must lie, ultimately, with Moscow, even as we investigate the forensic sequence of a commander’s chilling order—“Fire!”—and an underling’s deadly compliance.
Three hundred people, 189 of them Dutch, are dead at the hands of forces who owe their loyalty to Vladimir Putin, Russia’s president, the man who has thrown his weight behind the armed rebellion in Ukraine. He is in every way the separatists’ godfather. The dismemberment of Ukraine is as much his cause as theirs. So any response has to make him hurt, personally; it has to puncture his ego, his pride. And one certain way to hurt him would be to strip from Russia the right to host the 2018 World Cup. …
Michael Barone writes on the problems governments have purchasing information technology (IT).
Government don’t do IT good. Not just here in the United States, but in Britain, as this Telegraph blogpost argues. “Most nations — but especially the USA — have a woeful record when it comes to IT procurement,” writes blogger Willard Foxton, with a link to a subject that is familiar to American readers, the debacle of the Obama administration’s healthcare.gov.
Foxton goes on to say that it’s not only governments that have problems procuring information technology. So do private sector firms, he writes, citing a McKinsey & Co. report that half of large IT projects “go wildly over budget.”
There’s a difference here, though, between the private and public sectors. The private sector is held accountable in the marketplace. If IT doesn’t work, or if cost overruns raise prices to uncompetitive levels, consumers have alternatives. When government IT fails, however, the citizen doesn’t have any alternative. You stare at your computer, wondering if it might work if you hit it with a hammer.
All of which suggests that centralized command-and-control government is an unsuitable means of delivering services in the information age. …
Barone mentioned Willard Foxton’s post in a Telegraph, UK Blog. Here that is.
While I was phoning around this morning for an explanation to why the Government’s latest big IT project has ended with £350 million being flushed down the lavatory, one respected contractor told me: “I just don’t think the UK government should be allowed to buy IT at all. Maybe give them abacuses, but they could still get those wrong.”
It’s not just a problem for the UK either. Most nations – but especially the USA – have a woeful record when it comes to IT procurement. Here’s a list of the seven most expensive IT failures in US government history – and that was written before the Obama administration’s healthcare.gov debacle.
It’s not just government projects that go wrong, though. Private sector organisations, especially ones on the scale of government (like banks) have giant IT disasters all the time. According to this 2012 report by McKinsey, over half of all large IT projects go wildly over budget. 17 per cent go so badly that they threaten the commissioning company’s existence, and more than 40 per cent of them fail absolutely. In another study, Computer World found that only 6.4 per cent of high budget IT projects succeeded in their own terms.
So one reason that large-scale IT projects fail is because they are incredibly hard, public or private. However, there are unique things about government projects that make the chances of success even lower. …
A blog named Refreshing News has a post on berry good cancer fighting fruits.
For disease prevention and health maintenance, berries of all colors have “emerged as champions.” Research has focused mainly on cancer prevention and treatment. Studies show that the anticancer effects of berries are partially mediated through their abilities to counteract, reduce, and also repair damage resulting from oxidative stress and inflammation. Berries may also have many other positive effects, such as boosting detoxifying enzymes. …
NY Post article on the bullet from the sun we dodged a couple of years ago.
Two years ago, we were all going about our daily business, blissfully unaware that our planet almost plunged into global catastrophe.
A recent revelation by NASA explains how on July 23, 2012, Earth had a near miss with a solar flare, or coronal mass ejection (CME), from the most powerful storm on the sun in over 150 years, but nobody decided to mention it.
Err, what? Well, that’s a sobering bit of news.
“If it had hit, we would still be picking up the pieces,” says Daniel Baker of the University of Colorado.
We managed to just avoid the event through lucky timing as the sun’s aim narrowly turned away from Earth. Had it occurred a week earlier, when it was pointing at us, the result could have been frighteningly different. …
The New Scientist, apropos of Kevin Williamson’s article on the importance of property, says if you want to preserve forests give them to people who will value them.
The best way to protect rainforests is to keep people out, right? Absolutely not. The best way to keep the trees, and prevent the carbon in them from entering the atmosphere, is by letting people into the forests: local people with the legal right to control what happens there.
Given the chance, most communities protect rather than plunder their forests, says a new study by the World Resources Institute and Rights and Resources Initiative, both in WashingtonDC. The forests provide food, water, shelter, medicines and much else.
The report, Securing Rights, Combating Climate Change collates many existing studies. It concludes that forest communities only have legal control over one-eighth of the world’s forests. The rest is mostly controlled by governments or leased for logging or mining, often in defiance of community claims.
But community-owned forests are often the best-protected. In the Amazon rainforest, deforestation rates in community-owned areas are far lower than outside. …
Victor Davis Hanson reminds us of Gen. George Patton’s summer of 1944.
Nearly 70 years ago, on Aug. 1, 1944, Lieutenant General George S. Patton took command of the American Third Army in France. For the next 30 days they rolled straight toward the German border.
Patton almost did not get a chance at his summer of glory. After brilliant service in North Africa and Sicily, fellow officers — and his German enemies — considered him the most gifted American field general of his generation. …
… When Patton’s Third Army finally became operational seven weeks after D-Day, it was supposed to play only a secondary role — guarding the southern flank of the armies of General Bradley and British Field Marshal Bernard Montgomery while securing the Atlantic ports.
Despite having the longest route to the German border, Patton headed east. The Third Army took off in a type of American blitzkrieg not seen since Union General William Tecumseh Sherman’s rapid marches through Georgia and the Carolinas during the Civil War.
Throughout August 1944, Patton won back over the press. He was foul-mouthed, loud, and uncouth, and he led from the front in flamboyant style with a polished helmet and ivory-handled pistols.
In fact, his theatrics masked a deeply learned and analytical military mind. Patton sought to avoid casualties by encircling German armies. In innovative fashion, he partnered with American tactical air forces to cover his flanks as his armored columns raced around static German formations.
Naturally rambunctious American GIs fought best, Patton insisted, when “rolling” forward, especially in summertime. Only then, for a brief moment, might the clear skies facilitate overwhelming American air support. In August his soldiers could camp outside, while his speeding tanks still had dry roads.
In just 30 days, Patton finished his sweep across France and neared Germany. The Third Army had exhausted its fuel supplies and ground to a halt near the border in early September. …
Andrew Malcolm with late night humor.
Fallon: A British firm is developing a new veggie — Brussel-Kale. It’s a combination of Brussels sprouts and kale. They got the idea from a child’s nightmare.
Conan: Amazon has introduced its own smartphone. You can tell it’s from Amazon because after you hang up with someone, the Amazon phone suggests other people you may want to call.