White House Chronicle

News Analysis With a Sense of Humor

The Falklands: From Obscurity to Prosperity

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By Llewellyn King

PORT STANLEY, Falkland Islands — These islands, where the weather in summer is as bleak as it is in winter and where the only constant is the wind, aren’t easy to love. It’s a climate so perverse that it can rain, turn sunny, rain again, turn cold and rain all over again in the same day. Also, they’re very remote — almost 1,000 miles from Argentina, which hardly makes them any kind of offshore island, as Argentina insists.

No one much wanted the Falklands down through history. The British were there in 1765, and so were the French, but on separate islands and unbeknown to each other. The British were pushed out when Spain got possessive, but came back in 1833 and stayed.

When the British Empire included swathes of Africa and much of Asia, islands here and there didn’t rate a lot of concern in London. It’s doubtful whether experienced officers in the colonial service even knew where they were.

Yet there were rugged British settlers who made a living for generations out of ship servicing, fishing, cattle and, big time, sheep farming from 1870 to the present. Now there are just over 2,000 Falklanders, making a robust living out of farming and tourism, mostly from cruise ships.

In 1953, Britain rejected Argentine President Juan Peron’s bid to buy the Islas Malvinas (Falkland Islands). But in the 1970s, Britain wanted to hand them over to Argentina. The downsizing of the empire was well along. Only Rhodesia was a problem, where stubborn colonials held out for the right to perpetuate their rule over or alongside the indigenous inhabitants. In 1980, under newly elected Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, Britain handed over Rhodesia to Robert Mugabe and his band of former guerillas. The Thatcher government stripped the citizenship of 240,000 white settlers, telling them they were now citizens of Zimbabwe – which is ironic, considering the high value that was placed on the ancestry of the Falklanders.

So while this fire sale of colonies was in progress in the 1970s, the Falklands, with only 2,000 British citizens and 800,000 sheep, was of no account. The handover to Argentina looked like a done deal.

But, as so often in history, things fell apart largely because Argentina was consumed with internal problems, after the seizure of power by the military junta headed by Leopoldo Galtieri. Thatcher was more occupied with the sagging British economy than handing over islands far off the coast of Argentina. And while the Dirty War, in which Argentine security forces and allied thugs were responsible for the disappearance of tens of thousands of people, was raging, Argentina wasn’t to be rewarded with a gift of islands on which Britons farmed.

Then, to boost his own shaky position, Galtieri whipped up a cause and invaded the Falklands on April 2, 1982. The dictator must have thought that Britain would roll over and accept the forcible seizure of the Falklands, much as it had abandoned the British settlers in Zimbabwe two years earlier.

But for Thatcher, the Iron Lady, the Falklands seizure was simple aggression. War fever gripped Britain and much of its ally, the United States. Columnist George Will wrote about the ending of diplomatic efforts by the Reagan administration: time for the diplomats to “come north and cold steel to go south.”

So we watched a British fleet steaming south, while the Argentine forces dug in on the Falklands.

It took a month for the British forces to reach the Falklands and the counter invasion to begin. The fighting lasted 74 days with 649 Argentine military personnel, 255 British military personnel, and three female islanders killed.

The Falklands War did wonders for Thatcher, sweeping her Conservative Party back into power in 1983. For her, it was the seminal act of her premiership, the last roar of the Imperial Lion. In its way, it did for her what firing the air traffic controllers the previous year did for President Ronald Reagan. It showed just how tough they could be.

At the time of the war, the Falklands were a drain on the British Treasury. Now, thanks to that war, this is a tourist destination with behemoth cruise ships — sometimes three at once — anchored here.

But Argentina still lays claim to the islands — a claim now as constant as the wind. — For InsideSources

 

 

 

 

 

 

A New Approach to Revolutionize Clinical Trials

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By Llewellyn King
It may be the biggest thing in medicine in a long time. It’s not a new drug, or therapy or discovery. Instead it’s a new way of doing clinical trials which could have a dramatic effect, particularly on those diseases that get less attention.
 
Initially it is aimed at the deadliest brain cancer, glioblastoma multiforme, known as GBM. From diagnosis, it can kill in about six months.
 
Traditionally clinical trials test one drug or a therapy on a lot of patients, sometimes thousands, against a control group that is treated with a placebo, or not treated at all. Trials drag on for years.
 
The aim in clinical trials, which are certified by the Food and Drug Administration and reviewed by FDA-appointed panels of experts, is to make sure that a drug, medical device or procedure is safe and effective. This system costs a huge amount of money — hundreds of millions of dollars — and takes years. It produces no collateral knowledge; and it doesn’t alleviate the suffering.
 
Also, it’s an imperfect system. When a drug or medical device is certified for sale by the FDA, it may be less effective than the manufacturer claims, or not safe. Witness the recalls and lawsuits against drugs and medical devices — like the ones against Avandia, the diabetes drug, and transvaginal mesh.
 
This form of testing is totally inappropriate for virulent diseases, where the cohort being tested is unlikely to live long enough to find the results. 
 
That stark truth has driven a global fraternity of specialists in brain cancer to set up a new concept in clinical trials. These doctors, neurosurgeons, neuro-oncologists, biostatians and genetic researchers are out to make trials a present-tense matter.
 
Members of this fraternity of researchers and clinicians come from around the globe with a heavy emphasis on the United States, China and Australia. They gathered in Washington last month to launch their trial, known as GBM AGILE, an acronym for Adaptive Global Innovative Learning Environment.
 
They are driven by the knowledge, as Anna Barker, GBM AGILE project director, put it, that the present treatments for GBM “are unacceptable.”
 
She told me that there has been little progress over the years. Other doctors told me that the three treatments used at present — surgery, chemotherapy and radiotherapy  — aren’t saving patients. Few survive, or have their lives appreciably extended.
 
“It is not acceptable, not acceptable,” Barker said over and over again.
 
Barker is a professor at Arizona State University, a former deputy director for strategic initiatives at the National Cancer Institute, part of the National Institutes of Health, and a crusading force for improvement in brain cancer treatment, as well as how clinical trials are conducted.
 
Webster Cavenee, a professor at the University of California at San Diego, said the drug that is used for treating this aggressive cancer doesn’t work because the cancer, which doesn’t metastasize, becomes resistant to it in a short time, rendering the procedure useless. “We need a cocktail of drugs,” he said, “so that the cancer is deceived.” 
 
The FDA, often seen as a barrier to new treatments, is on board with GBM AGILE and has promised to approve new procedures within days, according to Barker.
 
The work to get the trials set up is already well underway. More than 100 cancer specialists, divided into 10 major committees, are working on the structure. 
 
As I understand it, GBM AGILE will establish a global pool of patients whose physicians will report on therapies, drugs and environments that succeed or fail, building a huge database of clinical knowledge. Patients will cycle out, hopefully because they are cured, but sadly, more likely, because they’ve succumbed. The organizers call it “crowd-sourcing knowledge.”
 
It is hoped that major funding will come from big foundations and charities. But initially the institutions that will participate have been defraying expenses, with an important assist from the small but energetic group, the National Foundation for Cancer Research, whose president, Sujuan Ba, has played a role in bringing in Chinese research institutions.
 
In the lay language of today, there won’t be any stovepiping, less repetitive prescribing of doubtful treatments, and a greater sharing of the patient experience.
 
Vice President Joe Biden is an enthusiastic supporter. His beloved son, Beau, died from GBM. Biden told the gathering of BMG AGILE founders in Washington that if Beau hadn’t contracted the disease, he would’ve run for the presidency. — For InsideSources

All Hail Thanksgiving, So American a Day

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By Llewellyn King

I wasn’t raised in the United States. I’m of the British persuasion and 50 years into my life in the New World, I still think there isn’t much as nifty as Thanksgiving. But to a point.

Although there are other harvest festivals, they pale before Thanksgiving: the greatest of the “Thank you, Lord” celebrations. Christmas became commercialized a long time ago. Now it has become politicized, too. How sad.

But that doesn’t mean that Thanksgiving isn’t in the sights of those who sell things. There’s a car dealer near me who not only flies the largest Stars and Stripes that can be hoisted aloft, but he’s got a blowout sale for Veterans Day, Columbus Day, Presidents’ Day, the Fourth of July and, for good measure, he has offers you can just about refuse on Mother’s and Father’s days and, I suppose, Take Your Daughter to Work Day — and all below invoice. What a guy!

Yes, he has ads running for Thanksgiving. If you rush out and buy a car you don’t need, he’ll no doubt give thanks. He should settle for turkey like the rest of us.

Not only does Thanksgiving bring out the marketers more and more, it also puts into the kitchen people who shouldn’t have left the pizza parlor. Although it’s a largely untrammeled and genuine family day, that browned turkey, that tart cranberry sauce, that fluffy mashed potato casserole, and that oh-so-sweet pecan pie are something else.

Mark Twain said something to the effect that no one would endeavor to play the fiddle without some prior instruction, but that no such inhibition applies to writing. Twain missed something: no such inhibition applies to cooking on Thanksgiving.

Just before the Great Thursday, many unqualified cooks will be desperately asking how long to roast a turkey, steam squash, and chill a pie crust. People who never cook feel they must cook for the extended family on Thanksgiving.

Uncle Theodore’s famous apple pie might as well have been developed by the U.S. Army for close combat missions. Aunt Doreen’s sweet potatoes with marshmallows are, quite simply, lethal. They should be the first thing stored in the nuclear waste repository at Yucca Mountain, Nev.

Adorable cousin Suzy, who overdresses and talks about her hope of being on the red carpet someday, won’t make it onto Food Network. Her cake has the taste of its name: Red Velvet.

Dad pours bourbon into just about everything. But everyone pours his bourbon-laced carrot soup into any obliging receptacle, like the table centerpiece.

A vomitorium – not the passageway in an ancient Roman amphitheater where patrons disgorged rapidly at the end of a performance – could be a welcome room, after those who hit the range once a year have inflicted gastronomic violence on those who can’t escape. No slipping out to a hostelry, calling for takeout, or claiming a fasting diet at the family Thanksgiving table.

You’ll take what’s coming to you and you’ll accept seconds because this is your family, and they love you. Besides, once again, you got out of hosting the event, for which you’ll give thanks.

Happy Thanksgiving to all. It’s the great American day and thankfully, my in-laws are good cooks. — For InsideSources.com

The Carbon Solution Obama Won’t Take to Paris

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By Llewellyn King

The Treaty of Paris, signed in 1783 by representatives of King George III of England and the fledgling United States of America in a Paris hotel, ended the Revolutionary War.

Next month, another document will be signed in Paris: the climate agreement. It will be signed by about 200 countries, and will commit the signatories to meaningful reductions in their greenhouse gas emissions, mostly carbon. And it will be as seminal in its way as the one recognizing that the colonists of America would no longer be subject to the rule of England.

My point is not that this treaty of Paris will be perfect, or that every signatory will abide by its terms, but that it will do something that is vital, if climate change endeavors are to prevail: It will establish globally a kind of carbon ethic.

The concept of an environmental ethic started with Rachel Carson’s book “Silent Spring,” back in 1962. Since then, the world has known it should examine the environmental impact of major actions. After Paris, it will consider the carbon impact in a new way.

President Obama’s supporters will be jubilant when the signing starts in Paris. But Obama does not deserve all the praise that will come his way from Democrats and environmental organizations.

If the Obama administration were as concerned with the reduction in greenhouse gases, particularly carbon, as it says it is, it would not have given the back of its hand to nuclear power. Nuclear produces a lot of electricity and no greenhouse gases. Zero.

Yet the administration, yearning for a carbon-free future, has done nothing to address the temporary market imbalance that cheap natural gas has produced. Get this: a nuclear plant has a life of 60 years, and new ones may last 80 years. What we have now is a short-term price advantage in natural gas forcing the closure of nuclear plants, even though gas will cost more over the decades.

The administration leans heavily toward wind and solar power, understandably against coal and almost ignores nuclear. For example, nuclear does not get the support it deserves in the Environmental Protection Agency’s Clean Power Plan: its blueprint for carbon reduction. Nuclear is an also ran, not a central plank.

The nuclear project needs updating. It needs a revision of the standards for radiation protection which were enacted when nuclear science was young and radiation little understood. They need to be reevaluated and almost certainly lowered in the light of today’s science. This would help across the nuclear spectrum from power plants to medicine to how nuclear waste is handled.

The administration declares itself in love with innovation and has offered partial funding for new, small modular power plants. But it does this without regard to the dysfunctional nature of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. This bureaucracy is so sclerotic, pusillanimous and risk averse that it has priced new reactors out of the possibility of being built in the United States. Because the NRC is a fee-collecting agency, it is estimated that to license a brand new reactor — a better, safer, cheaper reactor — would cost $1 billion and 10 years of hearings and submissions. That is a preposterous inhibitor of American invention.

If the Federal Aviation Administration acted as the NRC does, we might well be flying around in propeller aircraft, while the agency studied jet engines and, for good measure, questioned the ability of wings to provide lift.

Certainly, the NRC should be protected from outside pressure that might impinge on safety, but it should not be so ossified, so confined in a bunker, that it cannot evaluate anything new.

Yes, something big is going to happen in Paris: Those big polluting nations, China and India, but especially China, are going to lay out their ambitious plans to reduce carbon — with nuclear.

Champions of the president will cheer Paris as a big part of his legacy, but his achievement is less than it should be. And nuclear power, like so much else that America led the world in, is headed overseas where it will evolve and probably flourish as the carbon-free champion of the future. Shame on the administration. — For InsideSources.com

A Plan to Save the Debates

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By Llewellyn King

It’s time to fix the presidential candidate debates. If they aren’t fixed, they’ll become as irrelevant as the president’s Saturday radio addresses. These don’t fall on deaf ears so much as they fall on no ears.

The debates, structured as they are at present, somewhere between “Jeopardy” and the National Spelling Bee, don’t cut it.

We all deserve to look at our best at times, and to be judged by our best opinions and ideas. But the present debate format shows every candidate at their worst; fumbling to recall names, tripping over facts half-remembered and looking, well, absolutely anything but presidential.

If the purpose of the debates is to gauge the worth of the candidates’ policies, the way we are doing it is hopeless, favoring (if these extended press conferences favor anyone) the candidate who can summon up the most loved political clichés. For the Democrats, protecting granny from being thrown under the bus; and for the Republicans, the de rigeur attack on the size of government.

None of it is enlightening; none of it answers the real questions of’ statesmanship or illustrates the mental agility and even cunning of the candidate – qualities that serve well in crisis.

The key to my debate fix is borrowed from the hugely popular Prime Minister’s Question Time in the British House of Commons.

Ever wondered how the prime minister can know the state of road repairs in Peebles in the Scottish Borders, and equally what the government is doing to protect British nurses in Bahrain? He isn’t the great Oz. He knows the question in advance, but not the follow-ups or the interjections. This leads to good answers (or at least plausible ones) and real repartee, as the two parties go at each other.

Now I can hear the howls, the shrieks, the hyena-like noises that will come from my colleagues in journalism, as they’re asked to commit the sin of submitting a question. But we’d get real answers. And those answers would lay the candidate open to penetrating follow-ups like these:

“What makes you think that the economy can grow, despite the best efforts of other presidents?”

“Are you proposing a return to the gold standard, and all the trouble with that?”

“How are you going to arrest 11 million people?”

“Are you going to survive stories of deportees being sent stateless out to sea?”

“Do you know that more illegal immigrants are coming here by plane than by foot across the Southern Border?”

“Why, to begin with, did you feel your e-mails should be exempt from the way of doing things observed by other secretaries of state — one rule for them and another for you?”

“If you want the government out of our lives, why do you want it in the most private of situations, when a woman is with her gynecologist?”

The follow-up questions would reveal who the candidates are far more than gotcha questions to people who cannot be prepared for every policy that a president might encounter in four years in office.

This formula would still allow for the spontaneous bon mots that every candidate hopes will lift him or her to verbal Valhalla, like Ronald Reagan’s near immortal “There you go again.”

After that first question, there would be cut-and-thrust, give-and-take, but solid positions would’ve been laid down, parameters established, such as how the candidate’s tax cut would be paid for, or why the Department of Defense, so at home with cost overruns, would do a better job with military and civilian nuclear wastes than the Department of Energy, a recurrent theme every election cycle.

If the candidates felt more comfortable on the major questions of their campaigns, they’d give better debate. — For InsideSources.com

The Collision Course in the South China Sea

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By Llewellyn King

When I was learning to fly, one of the lessons was that if you see an object on the horizon that is seemingly stationary but getting larger, watch out. It is probably an aircraft closing with you.

Trouble with China in the South China Sea is on the horizon of U.S. strategic concerns and getting larger. A major confrontation may be at hand.

China claims sovereignty over the Spratly and Paracel islands in the South China Sea. Its claims have been disputed by Brunei, Malaysia, the Philippines,Taiwan and Vietnam.

Ignoring these neighbors’ territorial claims, China has built artificial islands on otherwise submerged reefs in the Spratly archipelago. They have built runways, capable of landing military jets, on Fiery Cross and Subi reefs, and are building one on Mischief Reef.

Vietnam and the Philippines have also built up reefs, but on a smaller scale, and mostly to help their fishing fleets.

Offshore islands, real or summoned from the deep, are trouble. Argentina and Chile nearly went to war over the Beagle Channel Islands, off the inhospitable tip of South America, until Pope John Paul II brokered a peace deal in 1984.

Britain and Argentina most certainly did go to war in 1982 over the Falkland Islands, which Argentina claimed then and still claims.

Nations use territorial disputes not only to divert attention from domestic problems, but also to heal the real or imagined wounds of history.

China feels, reasonably, that it was kicked around in history. Britain occupied parts of it, most notably Hong Kong, and then acted as a drug lord in the 19th-century Opium Wars. In the 20th century, China was invaded by Japan.

Now, as the world’s second-largest economy and most populous nation, China is feeling assertive.

But all of Asia, and by extension the rest of the world, is invested in this dispute: one third of the world’s shipping passes through the South China Sea, and its rich fishing grounds are a vital food source for the region.

The Chinese bolster their claims with a 1947 map showing what is known as the “nine-dash line,” or the cow’s tongue because of its shape, in the South China Sea. This line extends around the sea and encloses 90 percent of the area; by historical standards this is a whopper of a claim for territory, and one which threatens U.S. allies in the region as well as our shipping.

The Chinese claims appear to be in total violation of international law,  particularly the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea, which the United States has not ratified, and which China ratified in 1996.

The dispute with claims and counterclaims is laid out in a new, dispassionate report by the Boston Global Forum, a Harvard professor-heavy think tank.

The United States responded to the China’s claim of territorial integrity for its artificial islands after a long delay, testing the right to navigate by sending the USS Lassen, a guided missile destroyer, through the 12-nautical-mile zone off Subi Reef on Oct. 27. China has reacted angrily with aerial exercises.

The USS Lassen’s transit of the reef appears to have divided the White House. At one point, Defense Secretary Ashton Carter would not acknowledge in public that it had actually happened, or that U.S. aircraft might test the Chinese claim to territorial air rights.

These actions are known as freedom of navigation operations, or FONOPS. It is a term we will hear more of if the United States and China cannot divert from their brinkmanship in the South China Sea.

The United States does not favor any nation’s claim to islands, or even rocks, in that sea. It does, though, have a vital interest in checking Chinese expansion and the interests of its Asian allies who expect a robust U.S. response to China’s island grab — and claim to a whole ocean. — For InsideSources.com

You Can Keep Cutting Taxes, If You Want to Pay the Price

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By Llewellyn King

Those Republican presidential candidates who had been governors, vied with each other in their latest debate to claim who had cut taxes the most.

When I hear tax-cutting expounded as an unassailable conservative virtue, my mind goes back to a lunch in Houston in the 1970s, when two of conservatism’s rising stars and I were speakers at a meeting of the American Petroleum Institute.

The stars were Trent Lott, then a member of the House from Mississippi, and George Will, the hottest columnist burning up the op-ed pages across the country.

The three of us were urged to lunch together while the organizers got organized. I had recently launched The Energy Daily, a publication in Washington, D.C.

The conversation turned to taxes. We all agreed that we while we hated paying taxes, the United States was an under-taxed country. Let me repeat: Trent Lott, George Will and I agreed that the United States was under-taxed country.

So, I ask, how did we get to where we are today, when Republican presidential hopefuls are firmly committed to tax-cutting; when every state or local Republican governing body would rather see chaos reign — as has happened with our cities — than whisper that we should raise money to fix the problem?

The standard-bearer for taxophobia is neither an elected official nor a presidential hopeful. He is Grover Norquist, founder and president of Americans for Tax Reform, a political organization as powerful as the National Rifle Association, and as distorting of the national agenda.

Norquist has introduced a rigidity that makes discussion of tax policy almost impossible on the right. Tax has become not a matter of need and policy, but a litmus test of conservative purity.

The genesis of taxes as an evil goes back to a group of young conservatives — which included Norquist — with a consuming conviction that government is too big, and that the only way to cut it down to size (what size?) was, in their phrase, to “starve the beast.”

The problem is that Americans keep asking more of their government, and consequently it grows. We want more diseases to be researched by the National Institutes of Health, and more energy solutions to be developed by the Department of Energy. We want the food chain to be secured and nuclear waste disposed of. We want better roads, bridges, airports and air traffic control. When something untoward happens, like bee colony collapse or the disappearance of a strain of bananas, we want the Department of Agriculture to find a fix.

All those without a mention of providing social services, extending entitlements, and beefing up the military — all favored by the public.

The trouble gets worse when tax-cutting becomes an ethic, because even good taxes are an anathema to politicians, who are wont to start their political lives by signing Norquist’s “no new taxes” pledge.

Take the mess the highway trust fund is in. It is funded in fits and starts by a conflicted Congress, trapped between what it knows to be need and the desire to limit spending. Infrastructure needs to be funded in multi-year programs. Before the recent budget deal, it was funded for just three months. Can anyone build a bridge in three months?

The danger of blind tax hatred can be seen with the gas tax. It is generally agreed that using less gasoline would be a net good: fewer oil imports, fewer greenhouse gases, and more livable cities. Today’s price is low, even by historical standards.

An opportunity that may never come again exists to fix much of the nation’s crumbling infrastructure by increasing the federal gas tax from its present 18.4 cents per gallon, where it has languished since 1993. There is enormous elasticity in the amount of gas an individual or a family uses. You can buy a smaller car or a hybrid, or travel less. The price of gas is not like the price of shelter.

Many of the ills that contribute to the sense that the nation has lost its way would go away with better roads and general infrastructure improvement. You do not feel good waiting to cross a bridge or idling for hours on Interstate 95.

Sitting in a traffic jam for two hours in the morning and two hours at night may not qualify as a tax, but it is taxing. — For InsideSources.com


Signaling Climate Virtue in Paris

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By Llewellyn King

Anyone who is anyone will be off to Paris in December. That’s where the United Nations is holding its Climate Change Conference. Forget Davos: That annual summit in the Swiss Alps is just for billionaire buffoons who have made it big on the Internet and mastered the art of lending money to Greece and getting out early, or those who think that standardizing coffee shops is good for the world.

Davos is better for partying in January than the Super Bowl because it drags on for days. But if you aren’t one of the aforementioned billionaires, after your first two bottles of wine, you’ll have to fly home because no one told you how expensive Switzerland is, nor how hard the Swiss franc is next to every other currency.

The best of all possible places in the world to be on November 30 to December 11 is Paris. If you’re not there, it says you don’t care.

In progressive circles, you have to be seen to care deeply. Your presence in Paris will manifest “virtue signaling” — a phrase on everyone’s lips in Britain since James Bartholomew coined it in the April 18, 2015 edition of The Spectator, a weekly British conservative magazine. You know how it works. You wear fake fur to signal that you love animals. You drive a hybrid vehicle to show that you save oil and are doing your bit to reduce your carbon footprint. That signals virtue, but it’s a week signal. You can boost that signal by attaching a conspicuous bicycle rack to your hybrid vehicle, even if you don’t own a bike.

You have to be careful in Paris. Signaling is everything: Think before you signal. For example, claim you had other business that brought you to Paris, like the book you’re planning to write on the Louvre or the history of alfresco sex along the Seine in the time of the Francois I. This way, you avoid the thought — perish it — that you wasted all that jet fuel just to attend a conference where you absolutely knew you had to be seen, like the White House Correspondents’ Association annual dinner in Washington, D.C.

If you flew to Paris first class, conceal it by complaining about the smallness of the seats and awfulness of the meals. If you’re winging across the Atlantic or the Pacific in a private jet, land in another country and take the train to Paris. European trains are electric and that signals virtue. Generally trains signal virtue, except Amtrak, which signals something else.

Housing is a problem in Paris because you’ll be tempted to stay in one of the great hotels. Warning! Cross these places of luxury, taste and convenience off the list: The Ritz, the George V, the Bristol, and the Meurice. People who signal their deep concern about global warming are also concerned by the amount of energy it takes to keep the rich in comfort.

If you’re to get entry to the finest salons on the Left Bank and the conference halls, and if you’re to shake hands with climate seer James Hansen, you must signal virtue. Borrow a bicycle, or grow a beard, but not too full or Le Flick, the French police, will have you in the cells as a terrorist in no time.  Sandals send a great signal, as do rough linens from India. If you have a lovely mink, leave it at home. Bad signaling. If Paris turns cold, buy a duffel coat or an old military great coat. Show them that you care, that you live lightly on the Earth.

If you can’t resist a slap-up dinner at Maxim’s or Laperouse, try getting there on the Metro wrapped in something dowdy. You can expose the fine threads inside. You’ll find staff very understanding. Hell, they learned it all from the French existentialists, who loved to signal virtue almost as much as they loved rich women, who bought them things while they philosophized: an unmistakable signal of virtue.

If you can just signal virtue, you can sink to any depths – and the good people of Paris will help you.

If I make it there, I’ll be staying in a modest hotel on the Ile St. Louis. And I’ll signal virtue by wearing cords and an old tweed jacket

Mark Twain said, “Give a man a reputation as an early riser, and he can sleep ‘til noon.” Signal virtue and you can let rip. –For InsideSources.com

AARP Is Alientating Me and Other Oldsters

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By Llewellyn King

The common law has a tort that allows an aggrieved party, a spouse or a lover, to sue for alienation of affections. Derived from English common law, it has been abolished in all but seven states.

The most obvious targets for lawsuits were lovers who had taken the loved one from a marriage and made away to some new love nest; there to pursue, well, you know.

But it wasn’t just the third party in a love triangle who could be sued. It could be a priest, a psychiatrist, or even a family member who had advised a change in the marriage or its equivalent.

Clearly, alienation of affections isn’t what the U.S. Chamber of Commerce has in mind when it cries out for tort reform.

My interest in this kind of lawsuit is practical. I wonder if there is an obscure tort that would entitle me to damages from the AARP. I want millions of dollars from the giant nonprofit organization for making me old. That’s right, old!

The AARP is in the business, besides selling insurance of all types, of alienating us oldsters from our sense of well-being, of the sense of triumph that has brought us this far. It wants to deny us one of the great joys that all of us in our Viagra years should be entitled to enjoy: the pleasure of ridiculing the younger generations.

Ah, the rapture! How can the young’uns, with their eyes glued to cell phones, know the thrill of the chase in the good old days? How can they know, in the these days of the Internet, what it was like to pursue the blue passages of literature that led us to John Donne, Sir John Suckling and Frank Harris? They don’t know what spats were, or the pleasures that were to be found at a drive-in movie theater with the girl next door.

The AARP wants to take away the comfort of reminiscing; wants to rob us of the joy of old-age superiority, and the satisfaction that comes from of looking down on those who aren’t gifted with mileage of time. Damn the AARP! The elephantine organization seems to want to make us old so that it can sell us stuff: insurance, cell phones, walk-in tubs, and funeral packages.

For evidence, and at random, I bring you the latest edition of the AARP Bulletin, a publication which, in the good old days, would have been banned in Boston. It’s a sampling of how the AARP is out to disquiet me and everyone else who has reached the Age of Enlightenment, which lies somewhere north of 65.

The cover sets the tone of latest issue. It features brain health, or how you can find out if you are losing your marbles. Inside, it has a quiz that anyone over d’un certain age who takes it will be reminded that they can’t remember little things like where they put their car keys, or that they made “a doctor appointment for a check-up months ago but completely forgot it.” Clearly signs that one is on the slippery slope of dementia.

Oprah Winfrey is on the cover, which states, “Oprah Joins Americans Over 50 On a Search for Meaning.” Hell, if Oprah hasn’t found the meaning that abides in a glass of single malt whisky at her age, I doubt anyone can help the poor dear. But does she have to take us with her, tramping through the forests of “whys” and “what ifs”?

If all the philosophers, clerics and gurus who ever lived can’t answer these questions, can we trust Oprah to answer the Big Question? Take a cruise, lady. It works for most of us.

Also in the bulletin, the AARP wants us to worry about “the frightening prospect of cyberattacks” on the electric grid. Really, we care more that we can’t work the electric gizmos that we have charged up in the best of times.

As to the ads, they focus on terminal illness, immobility (Want a stairlift on Medicare?), money shortage, and are so depressing that you wonder why we don’t collectively drink the Kool Aid. The AARP will sell that to us, too, probably.

The AARP has upped my anxiety and alienated me from the fun of being old. I want to sue. –For InsideSources.com

 

The Riddle of the U.S. Snub of Jordan

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By Llewellyn King

The continued refusal of the Obama administration to sanction the sale of Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAVs) aircraft to Jordan provides a kind of window into the confusion and incoherence of U.S. policy in the Middle East.

Next to Israel, little Jordan (population about 8 million) has been one of our best friends in the region. It has a peace treaty with Israel, and has been seen as a moderate force in the Arab world. Its royal family, Western-educated and bilingual in English, have been favorites, politically and socially, in London and Washington.

Jordan’s King Abdullah II was educated in England and the United States, having attended tony prep schools in both countries before he attended the Royal Military Academy Sandhurst (as did his father, King Hussein), the British equivalent of the United States Military Academy at West Point, in 1980. Commissioned into the British Army as a second lieutenant, he served for a year in 1981 as a troop commander in the 13th/18th Royal Hussars.

Abdullah took a few years off from the military in the 1980s, studying at Pembroke College, Oxford and Georgetown University. But before becoming king in 1999, he served in Jordan’s army, where he rose to the rank of major general, and air force, where he was trained to fly Cobra attack helicopters – his father was an avid and daring helicopter pilot.

My sources tell me that Abdullah is a close friend of Secretary of State John Kerry.

Yet when Jordan came a-knockin’, the administration barred the door. This with them knowing well that the Predator and the Reaper, which is a larger and more sophisticated model, are not the only UAVs on the market. Both Israel and China are vendors of unmanned surveillance aircraft, and Jordan is actively being courted by them. Curiouser and curiouser, as Alice cried.

The administration, while declaring its affection for Jordan, may have in mind that Jordan has been more friend than ally: Jordan did not support the U.S. invasion of Iraq. But why would that deter the Obama administration? It is because of the fight against ISIS that Jordan has requested permission to purchase unarmed Predators needed for surveillance, as well as armed ones.

The arguments for the sale, frequently championed by Rep. Duncan Hunter, R-Calif., is that it is a win-win for the United States and Jordan. Jordan gets the best technology for surveillance that money can buy; the United States gets one more eye in the sky over Syria and Iraq, which share borders with Jordan.

Sources to the left and right of the foreign policy establishment in Washington tell me they are baffled by the administration’s reluctance. Policy wonks are wondering aloud, “What is the White House thinking? It will lose a sale and Jordan will buy inferior military hardware, while being shut out of a valuable source of surveillance intelligence. If China or Israel supply drones to Jordan, U.S. access to this intelligence may come with strings.”

It is easy to understand that the administration does not know what to do about Syria. What might have been done was not done. Four years ago, there might have been the diplomatic equivalent of a plea bargain with Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, or we might have more effectively armed those rebelling against him, before those motivated by religious sectarianism became dominant.

But none of those missed opportunities justifies snubbing one of our only friends in the region, as chaos escalates beyond the wildest fears of many a Middle East Cassandra. The administration seems to have gone into a catatonic state in Middle East policy, feeling as though whatever it does will not work, and that its legacy will be written in failed states including Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya and Syria.

Hunter, who is a member of the House Armed Services Committee, said, “Damage has been done to U.S. relations with Jordan, but the simple act of approving drone exports would prevent further harm. If Jordanian policy, like President Obama’s, is to ‘degrade and ultimately destroy’ ISIS, why is the Obama administration refusing to provide an ally with the tools to do just that? ” — For InsideSources.com