(Eat my) Friday Shorts

 

Okay, I freely admit it – nothing of great social or political import today. So let the deep thinking occur in the other posts.

Command. Where only (theoretically) the best and the brightest get to. Repeated command slots says you’re a rising star, a comer, someone who is going places. Now, what could be the ultimate  – an independent command where you are solely in command of a power which can start or end wars, where the faith your command has in you is such that you are trusted to make the right decision totally independently – say, commanding your own submarine (apologies to Tom Clancy). In the West it’s supposedly only for our studs, right? In China… it’s for the duds.

Based on China’s college-entrance exam — called the gaokoa — the People’s Liberation Army Navy engineering university ranks No. 2 in test scores among the military academies, while the submarine academy consistently ranks in the bottom three, according to a paper written by Roderick Lee, an expert on the Chinese military at the US Naval War College. Business Insider

So bring a more seniorofficer, too, , sort of a giant ride-along. Then let’s throw in what the Russians call a zampolit political officer. Maybe there is a reason after all…anyone would would accept that kind of command threeway had better be pretty dumb to start with.

Now let’s move onto Dubai, where they got a bit over 6 1/4 inches of rain in one day. Hereabouts, that is a spring sprinkle. In a country with a bit over 3″ of ANNUAL rainfall, that’s a bunch. As always, conspiracy theorists are out in force:

After nearly two years’ worth of rain flooded the Dubai region Tuesday, attention quickly shifted to cloud seeding and whether it could have been a  factor in the deluge. The geoengineering technology has successfully produced rainfall over the arid United Arab Emirates in the past.  WaPo

Never fear, say scientists. It’s actually – wait for it – global warming did it. Don’t you feel better?

By the way, Dubai’s precise annual rainfall is 3.14 inches.

And let’s close with the  Transgender American Veteran’s Association – hitting the news – again.

The Transgender American Veterans Association, or TAVA, filed a lawsuit Monday in federal court seeking to compel the VA to cover the surgeries, its second lawsuit this year related to the issue.

The earlier lawsuit sought to force the VA to formally respond to a petition TAVA first filed in 2016 calling on the department to cover the surgeries. In February, the VA denied TAVA’s petition, making the earlier lawsuit moot.

Covering surgery could cost the VA anywhere from $3.5 million to $78 million annually, depending on the number of patients and the types of surgeries they get, according to a 2016 VA analysis. Military.com

$78 mill? How the hell many TGs are there in the military, anyway? I know we have been waiting for that flood of patriotic TGs to join up and swell the military’s ranks. How many have we enlisted so far?

At least the surgical equipment is already in stock…

 

Category: China, LGBTQWERTY, None