White House Chronicle

News Analysis With a Sense of Humor

Lament of the Airline Coach Passenger

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By Llewellyn King

The vice president for mollifying irate customers of one of the great airlines — there are only four left, and by the time you read this it may be down to three — has written me asking how I “enjoyed” my last flight. I wonder if this jokester even knows what that word enjoy means? Do they have access to dictionaries at Big Air? I couldn’t even get a second cup of coffee from a surly flight attendant, who only wanted to sit in the back of the plane and kvetch about the latest merger.

Definitely, asking you about the quality of your flight is in dubious taste: Have any Big Air executives ever walked back to coach, where we sit like rowers without oars in a trireme.

My missive from Big Air asks questions like, “How did you enjoy your reception at the check-in?” It said I should evaluate my level of experience from “very satisfied” to “very dissatisfied.”

How can you relate in those terms to a machine called a “kiosk”? As it so happens, my kiosk had serious socialization problems. It’s the seventh kiosk from the left at Washington Dulles International Airport, and it’s determined to prove its recalcitrance from the get-go. It rejected my credit card; it didn’t know my frequent flier number; it told me I wasn’t flying anywhere, as I didn’t exist because it couldn’t “get my record.”

It became quite civil, though, when trying to sell me a larger seat, take a fee for my baggage, and offering to sell me more frequent flier miles. What for? Does Kiosk No. 7 know they have 304 blackout days a year?

Having secured my ticket, I moved on to security — where some TSA worker any day now may be nabbed by a casting director for the archetypal role of a terrorist – which took a grim view of me. I stood bereft of shoes, belt, wallet and all identification so that I could put my hands in the air in a glass contraption. Another incipient movie bad guy examined the screen. Not good enough. I got wanded. Of course, if someone had made off with my plastic tray of possessions while this is going on, I’d have become stateless: undocumented, illegal.

Then I found that I was in Zone 4 for boarding. I’m always in Zone 4, no matter when I book my flight. I suppose I was pre-selected for Zone 4 on account of some library book I never returned. This means there wouldn’t be any room for my suitcase in the overhead compartment, and it’d be taken from me as though I’d been apprehended doing something I shouldn’t.

At least I’ve been saved sitting in a seat too small for its designed purpose for 20 minutes more than necessary. The seat that was too small for me, too small for smaller people, and very much too small for the enormous man who sat next to me.

Did you know they’ve got new seats now without a place to put your book or magazine? They have slim backs to reduce comfort and so more seats can be jammed in.

Then there was the toilet. You must use the one at the back because the people in first class – actually they’re not people, they’re corporate lawyers, a subset of homo sapiens — cannot be expected to share their spacious commode with the likes of coach travelers, who have a social disease: less money.

Here’s a tip you’ll appreciate if you’re a man: Decide which bodily function you plan to execute because there’s no room to turn around. No. 1, walk straight in; No. 2, back in. Women always have to back in.

The pilot came on. He sounded as though his last job was playing a trail boss on radio. You know, that special kind of speech that Easterners think Westerners actually speak: all about “critters” and “dudes,” and how we’re going to “canter over to LA.” 

It was going to be five bleak hours of discomfort.

But the good news is passengers won’t have to endure seats much longer. Coming to an airline near you: standing room only and meat hooks for safety belts. — For InsideSources

Busting Statues Is Like Burning Books

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By Llewellyn King

Messing with history is not a cool thing to do. But there is a lot of it going on; particularly, pulling down monuments or going after other people’s religious statues. This kind of heresy goes from the grotesque to the downright evil.

Topping my list of the grotesque is Nkotozo Qwabe, a young South African now studying as a Rhodes Scholar, who leads a movement to pull down the statue of Cecil John Rhodes at Oxford and, among other things, to ban the French flag from the campus. Compatriots of this ingrate have already removed a statue of Rhodes at South Africa’s University of Cape Town.

On the evil side is ISIS, and its ongoing destruction of antiquities in Iraq and Syria — most recently, the monumental ruins of the ancient city of Palmyra in Syria. With it, as with their razing of Hatra, Nineveh and Nimrud and other archaeological sites in Iraq, ISIS has turned to dust a world heritage: a cultural heritage and artifacts so precious that they rise above religion.

ISIS and the anti-Rhodes activists are trying to adjust history to passing present values. Knocking down an ancient temple or a statue is, in its way, book burning. It is destroying the record in order to distort the record.

Universities, here and abroad, are vulnerable to the demands of minority groups. Oxford has already removed one Rhodes plaque. At Princeton, students are demanding that Woodrow Wilson’s name be expunged for his support, as they see it, of white supremacy.

Decent people and institutions accede to the inane and foolish wants of minorities to appear reasonable to the unreasonable. Princeton has already gone some way down that slippery slope.

At Oxford, Qwabe is not content with just demonizing Rhodes. He has denounced the French for their colonial and current activities, and compared the French flag to the Nazi flag. And he has criticized Oxford for being Eurocentric. Why would it be anything else? Founded in 1096, it is the second-oldest European university.

Qwabe would have us, and the people of Africa, believe that Rhodes was a villain of unspeakable proportions, practicing racism and genocide. In reality, by today’s standards, he did some bad things and some very good ones, which include funding Qwabe’s attendance at Oxford.

Qwabe’s history is about as shaky as his gratitude. Rhodes was a controversial figure who believed absolutely in British exceptionalism as epitomized in the British Empire. He went to South Africa from England for his health and made a fortune in diamond mining. He entered politics and became prime minister of Cape Colony, on the tip of South Africa. There he seemed very enlightened, establishing a franchise that was open — as open as any at the time — and was not to be matched in South Africa until the fall of apartheid.

Where Rhodes’s dealings get murky is when he financed the push into what is now Zimbabwe. Rhodes defrauded the king of the Matabele, Lobengula, in the south of the country, but saved the Shona tribe, in the east and central region, from certain extinction at the hands of the Matabele, a newly arrived offshoot of the Zulus in South Africa who conquered lesser tribes, killed the men and boys, and forced the women into polygamous marriages.

Another good thing that Rhodes did was to cut off a chunk of South Africa, then known as Bechuanaland, now Botswana, from control by the Afrikaner Boers in 1895.

Rhodes also lavished his wealth on universities, including his alma mater Oxford and South African universities, including Cape Town, located on his former estate, and Rhodes, the eponymous university.

Rhodes did some reprehensible things but he believed in the public good as saw it — that being a manifestation of the British way of life, justice and values. Obliterating Rhodes’s historical role, and the few statues that point to it, is to meddle with the truth.

This same poison is at work on U.S. campuses, where student radicals bar speakers they disagree with from appearing. Punishing the memory of the great figures of history because they fail the social acceptability tests of the present is a disturbing part of the current academic scene, where free speech is under attack and free ideas are doctored to fit the values and prejudices of the moment.

There is a linkage between the thinking that is destroying the precious monuments of pre-Islamic civilization and punishing the memory of Rhodes and Wilson. The difference is only in degree. — For InsideSources


Let’s Honor the ‘Thing’ of the Year

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By Llewellyn King

Many publications, following the lead of Time, name a “Person of the Year.” This year, Time chose German Chancellor Angela Merkel.

According to Time, the criteria to be chosen is “the person or persons who most affected the news and our lives, for good or ill, and embodied what was important about the year.”

So at this year’s end, I think it is time for those who make those choices to add a co-equal category: things. Things change everything. They have throughout history, but with increasing rapidity in the last 150 years. And they do it more dramatically now than ever before.

The magazine’s first “Person of the Year” (actually, back then it was “Man of the Year”) was Charles Lindbergh in 1927. He was hailed for his first solo flight across the Atlantic Ocean on May 20-21 that year.

Huge and brave as Lindbergh’s flight was, it was the airplane not the man, that changed aviation.

People change the way we live, but so do things. We now talk about the “Internet of Things,” where our home and work machines are all connected to the Internet. With this connectivity, a farmer will plow his fields from the local diner; and Jeff Bezos, Amazon’s founder and CEO, will have his drones ring the doorbell when they deposit parcels.

The unfolding political year will have much sound and fury. Candidates will promise that if elected, they will change the country for the better. Yet technology might change us more. Ergo, we should have a “Thing of the Year.”

I hereby declare the Internet as the “Thing of 2015.”

Why now? Because this was the first year we stopped being aghast at the changes the Internet is bringing about and simply accepted them as a reality — just as 100 years ago, the automobile went from being a novelty to being part of the fabric of life.

This Christmas was the “Internet Christmas.” We bought more from Web retailers than ever before, and did not marvel at it. It is just “the way we live now.”

For holiday greetings, the Internet began to beat out traditional cards sent in the mail. E-mailing your greetings is less labor intensive, and easier to personalize. Next year, expect more e-cards. If I worked at Hallmark, I would be pushing for additional electronic products before cards become another quaint piece of Americana on display at the Smithsonian, like rotary dial telephones.

I have not welcomed the Internet over the years. I like things the way they were. But this year was seminal for me: I decided the Internet, even the “Internet of Things,” was OK.

Particularly, I like the way the Internet reaches out to the sick, the shut-ins, the truly lonely and the homesick. I can send Christmas greetings to family and friends in Austria, England, South Africa and Vietnam, as I have, from a little device balanced on my lap. Wow!

Yes, with the Internet, you and I can fly across the Atlantic faster than Lindbergh could gun his throttle.

Here are some things that might change your life more than any political figure in the year ahead:

1. A prototype of a driverless car may zoom down a test track.

2. Home 3D printing will spread — so if you break something, you can make a new one.

3. All your appliances and gadgets will start speaking to each other: Using your cell phone, you will be able to defrost a steak in your home refrigerator while you are at work; or you will be able to get a diagnosis by taking a selfie of your inflamed eye.

4. Your electricity may be generated on the roof of your house, and a robot may make your bed.

5. A whole new generation of rockets will offer space rides,

6. New materials, only one-atom-thick, may enable you to fold up your television set and put it in your pocket.

Forget the politicians. Better ask the “things” what is in store; they are starting to talk to each other, and I do not want to be left out of the society of things. — For InsideSources

Holidays: The Pain in with the Glitter

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By Llewellyn King

We all know about the dark side of the holidays: the pain of the lovelorn; the stress for the recovering alcoholic; the torment of parents who cannot provide gifts, even homes, for their children. Then there are those who bear loss: loss of employment, loss of a parent, loss of a partner and, most sad, loss of a child. And there are those who are shut-in, alone, and possibly hungry; others are in pain, physical pain that defies amelioration.

In the holiday season, my thoughts are about those who suffer from Myalgic Encephalomyelitis (ME), also known as Chronic Fatigue Syndrome (CFS). Its sufferers are walled off in plain sight, jailed by a disease that has no known cure and promises only suffering — by the day, the month, the year, the decade.

The government estimates that as many as  1 million Americans and another 17 million people worldwide are imprisoned by ME. Little is known about it, and nothing about the causes. It is understood to be a disease of the immune system, but there are those who want to believe, and have convinced some governments, that it is a psychiatric affliction. It is easier for government institutions, like Britain’s National Health Service, to believe in psychiatric nostrums than to treat and research the terrible suffering of the sick, the physically sick.

ME patients can be bedridden for years, unable to tolerate light or sound, and must rely on families or friends for basic needs. Sometimes they may seem a little better, but they cannot do the things of normal life. They are vulnerable to collapse after exercise or just normal activity.

Patients tell me that they know too well what my friend, colleague and ME sufferer Deborah Waroff says is the excruciating loneliness that comes with the induced isolation. It is the kind of loneliness that moved the 17th-century English poet John Milton to say, “Loneliness is the first thing which God’s eye named, not good.”

How often can a caregiver ask, “How are you feeling?” when the answer is known; was known yesterday, last year, and the year before, going back decades.

One sufferer told me she thought, in the height of her suffering, that she was already dead and was in limbo. Many sufferers have written to me saying they pray that they will not wake in the morning.

Suicide rates are high. Surely, suicide must be preceded by a loneliness that cannot be imagined? ME victims – and I have interviewed or had correspondence with hundreds — feel that not only do they suffer from symptoms which vary from pain in the joints, a sense that their limbs are exploding, headaches and mental fog, but they also have debilitating fatigue. Deborah Waroff, who has suffered since 1989, says it is like being a car that has no gas: You press the accelerator and nothing happens.

She, like other victims, has to ration her social life: a dinner with friends will result in collapse, and two or more days in bed. Likewise, going to a movie or a family gathering. Sometimes just making a simple meal is too much, and results in a return to one’s lonely bed.

Doctors, once they have decided that a patient has the disease, and if they have any knowledge of it, prescribe a variety of drugs from antivirals to large doses of vitamins. Some help with some symptoms, some do not. Ryan Prior, a young man who has made a documentary movie about ME, “Forgotten Plague,” takes as many as 19 pills a day. He was a star athlete in high school before being stricken. Now he manages his activities with stringent care. He is one of the lucky ones.

My correspondents from around the globe write to me about many things, but the most constant is their loneliness, exacerbated by the holidays. Marriages fail, love affairs go by default, and one is terribly, awfully alone.

There is aching aloneness for them each day, while others laugh and love. Mother Teresa said, “Loneliness is the most terrible poverty.”

That poverty is part of this disease. — For InsideSources

 

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