Well, it's time for another Monkey Brain day and there are a lot of subjects for me to swing back and forth from. The starting branch on today's journey into the obscure is from an article in Stars and Stripes. It seems the Army, as part of it's budget cutting requirements, has decided to make it harder for it's NCO's to re-enlist. They are putting out the announcement of the new tougher requirements along with a claim that they are doing it to make the Army a "leaner, meaner fighting machine". It smells a whole lot more like something coming from the civilian bureaucrats and bean-counters to me. Anyone with any cognitive ability and an IQ over 75 would see the gaping flaw in that thinking. By their reasoning you would take men and women whom you have spent hundreds of thousands and even millions of dollars on to recruit and train, and whom you have invested years running them from duty assignment to duty assignment to get them maximum experience -and then to tell them goodbye so you can recruit younger, unskilled, inexperienced people -all so you can save money on payroll? Really? Well, they can run around "the spin zone" all they want but it will still be a a bad idea which will result in decreasing not increasing the Army's capabilities. The Navy has not signed on to this thinking yet -let's hope it's not contagious among the civilian bureaucrats at the Pentagon.
The Obama Administration has announced a major diplomatic breakthrough in our dealings with North Korean. Hooray. It seems they have decided to stop producing nuclear material at one (yeah, just one) of their facilities and allow international inspectors in at that facility to verify it -in exchange for half a billion tons of free food. Wow, what a deal!
Of course, in order to get a real good feeling about all this you need to ignore a couple of things. First, they have at least four facilities making nuclear material, not one. Also, they have made this same kind of deal -not once but regularly, over the past 60 years. And we fall for it every time. They get the food, find an excuse to get mad at us or South Korea and break the deal. Simple and effective. Will somebody, please, tell me just how stupid is that? Oh, it's an election year, I forgot. Well, the Obama people won't be using this as some sort of stunt to make them look like they are accomplishing great things in foreign policy, would they? Naw, never.... Reading about all this something keeps popping into my head. Something Einstein said. Doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result is the definition of insanity......
Of course, in order to get a real good feeling about all this you need to ignore a couple of things. First, they have at least four facilities making nuclear material, not one. Also, they have made this same kind of deal -not once but regularly, over the past 60 years. And we fall for it every time. They get the food, find an excuse to get mad at us or South Korea and break the deal. Simple and effective. Will somebody, please, tell me just how stupid is that? Oh, it's an election year, I forgot. Well, the Obama people won't be using this as some sort of stunt to make them look like they are accomplishing great things in foreign policy, would they? Naw, never.... Reading about all this something keeps popping into my head. Something Einstein said. Doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result is the definition of insanity......
Live Long and Prosper....
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