E
DIT
ORIALS
Declare among the nations, and publish, and set up a standard;
publish, and conceal not; Jeremiah 50:2
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GUEST COLUMN by Barton Swain
an unpopular opinion: There is a future in
newspapers. I don't mean newspaper com-
panies. I mean physical, hard-copy newspa-
pers-the kind you buy on the street, the kind
someone tosses onto your driveway early in the morning
The kind everybody says will be a thing of the past in a
few years.
My conviction on this point stems from a decision I
made about a year ago--to subscribe to, as we used to
say, the paper. I was reluctant to do this, and for the usual
reason: You can read all the newspaper's content online,
either for free or for a smaller subscription price.
For several years, though, I had trouble with online news
reading, and I thought maybe it was time for a regressive
revolt. I had begun to notice, first, that I remember almost
nothing I read online. I must have read scores of online
artides in 2016, say, but I can hardly remember one. Yet
somehow I can recall things I read in hard-copy newspa-
pers and magazines 20 or 30 years ago; in some cases I can
see the words on the page.
I had also begun to feel anxious that, despite all the
news reading I do, I was never able to catch up. When
you get your news by searching online news aggregators
and perusingTwitter, you can spend an hour reading
artides--two hours, three hours--and still you feel you've
only read the smallest
slice of relevant news. You
read and read, but unread
stories are still everywhere
and you spend the rest of
your day feeling anxiously
ill-informed.
Newspapers mostly rid
you of that anxiety. When
you read the paper in the
morning, you spend 45
minutes or an hour doing
one thing: reading the news. When you put the paper
down, assuming you've made a decent effort to read and
understand a fair sampling of items, you've read the news.
At that point you can go about your day happy in the
knowledge that you have some idea of what sort of things
happened in the world yesterday and of what intelligent
people think about them.
The newspaper, and especially the serious metropolitan
daffy, allows you to ingest the news on an array of topics--
and be done with it. After spending an hour reading the
paper, you're as caught up on national and world affairs
as any person can daim to be. You're not aware of all the
profound and amazing writing "out there;' but you're suf-
ficiently well-informed, and for the remainder of the day
you can apply your mind to other tasks, without anxiety
or guilt.
The newspaper brings a kind of epistemological defini-
tion to the everyday work of being literate. You can hold
the day's knowledge with two ink-stained hands, and
when you're done with it, you can throw it away. It won't
update and demand to be read in a few hours, and it won't
follow you around on your smartphone.
I don't know what the future of newspapers may be. But
I know there is one--because newspapers are physical and
limited, and so are we.
This column first appeared in the April 16 Wall Street
Journal. Barton Swaim is opinion editor of the Weekly
Standard.
the Monr*m Co.tmty
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Publication No. USPS 997-840
PEACH STATE POLITICS by Kyle Wingfield
ome of what doesn't survive
is not to be regretted; some is.
Rarely do lawmakers stand by
effective entity fades into
the sunset. But there was one such
case this year.
The Georgia Council on Criminal
Justice Reform was created in 2013
-- by a law that provided for its dis-
solution on June 30, 2018, unless
legislators voted to keep it running.
They did not. So, after five years of
vetting and proposing ways to make
the state's criminal justice system
work smarter, the council will close
less than three months from now.
The original idea was to let the
council serve through Gov. Nathan
Deal's final legislative session, then
let his successor decide whether to
bring it back. It might be possible for
Deal to extend the council's life on
his own, perhaps by re-establishing
it under an existing agency. Either
wa) the next governor should seek
to reauthorize it legislatively. There's
more work to be done on this front,
including the work of demonstrating
how the new polities are performing
and what would improve them.
I'm a process guy -- all the person-
ality-typing systems out there tell me
it's in my nature -- so I'm drawn to
the process this council established.
Although several of the council's 15
members are elected officials, they
and the other members are appoint-
ed to the council. That affords them
some political insulation in research-
JUST THE WAY IT IS by
L shaaSt week, anyone see the Fake
News about a chemical attack
Syria against its own people?
al-Assad is accused of
hunching a chemical attack against anti-
government rebels in Douma, Syria that
killed upwards of 40 civilians and in-
jured scores more. Here's a quick review
on Syri use of chemical weapons:
August 2012 - Obama's famous (and
stupid) "Red Line" statement when he
warns Syria saying, "that a red line for
us is we start seeing a whole bunch of
chemical weapons moving around or
being utilized."
March 2013 - The US, France, and
other countries announce they have
strong evidence that Syria used gas
to kill civilians and rebel fighters. The
"red line" is crossed
August 2013 -in response to nu-
memns chemical attacks, Obama DOES
NOTHING. Oh wait, he condemned
Syria and angrily told Assad that he was
naugh
July 2014 - Secretary of State Kerr
on Face the Nation, reports, "We struck
a deal where we got 100 percent of the
chemical weapons out." (Libs and Dems
actually believed Kerry)
2015 - The feckless Obama and the
haughty John Kerry assured the world
that all chemical weapons were removed
from Syria. Therefore, any subsequent
report that Syria has used chemical
weapons is Fake News because Obama
talked tough and assured us that Syria
removed them.
2017-2018- Syria didn't remove
its chemical weapons, and the Assad
regime continues to use them against its
own people.
AS A FORMER member ofthe
intelligence community, I'm well aware
of our ability to collection information.
Intd agendes collect information from
a variety of sources. The sources are bro-
ken down into broad categories known
as SIGINT, IMINT, and HUMINT.
SIGINT is an acronym for signals intelli-
gence. SIGINT is the intelligence derived
from collecting signals and emissions
from devices that produce them such as
military radio transmissions, cell phone
calls, radar signals/emissions, and emis-
sions from numerous other devices and
weapons. IMINT is short for imagery
intelligence. It is the intelligence derived
from imagery - think satellite photos
and aerial photography (the U- 2 and
drones.) HUMRqT is human intd-
ligence and, like it sounds, is intelligence
from human sources. A prisoner ofwar
ing and forming their proposals --
which, of course, must be approved
by legislators and signed by the
governor to take effect. That insula-
tion lets them seek the best ideas for
reform, with political accountability
for those ideas on the back end.
It's a system that works, and would
continue to work. And not just for
criminal justice reform.
Consider, for ex-
ample, how difficult
health-care reform
has been on the state
level. (We'll set aside the
mess at the federal level
for today.) There are
market-oriented ideas
such as direct primary
care, which allows pa-
tients to contract with
doctors for a menu
of services, including
visits to specialists, as a
complement to high-
deductible, catastrophic
insurance plans. That is, it's "insur-
ance" rather than just prepaid health
care, the way insurance works for
automobiles. But neither direct pri-
mary care nor many other ideas that
would put decisions in the hands
of patients and doctors, instead of
government or, in some cases, insur-
ers, have gotten through the General
Assembly. Maybe working through
the obstacles and objections outside
the hurried, 40-day session would
help?
Another thorny issue that could
use this kind of process is the soar-
ing taxpayer cost of teacher pen-
sions. Georgia must keep its prom-
ises to those teachers already on
staffor retired. But the state needs
a new, effective retirement plan for
teachers hired in the future, since the
current arrangement is becoming
fiscally untenable and
may not be attractive
to tomorrow's work
force anyway. That is,
however, a debate most
elected officials are
loath to tackle. Perhaps
they t be more will-
ing to take up pension
legislation if the hard
work of crunching the
numbers and narrow-
ing the possibilities was
done by one of these
kinds of councils, with
representation from
pension experts and
education professionals alike.
The next governor would be wise
not only to keep the Council on
Criminal Justice Reform in place,
but to use it as a blueprint for other
reforms.
Kyle Wingfield's column runs in
newspapers around the state. A for-
mer columnist with the Atlanta ]our-
nat-Constitution, he is now president
and CEO of the Georgia Public Policy
Foundation: www.georgiapolicy.org.
Sloan Oliver
11I
In
e
is a human source, as is a CIA agent
who recruits a foreign "source" to gather
information. Another information
source, and often the most informative,
is OPEN SOURCE (OS) information.
OS is information available to everyone
- examples are newspapers, maga es,
and web sites. There are other aspects
to intelligence collection, but the take
away is that intelligence agendes gather
information from a number of sources.
Collected information is just one piece
of the puzzle. Then, it must be analyzed.
THE information
only becomes "intelligence" once it has
been integrated with other sources of
information and has been thoroughly
analyzed to produce an intelligence
sunmaar The intd summaries are
comparmaented and briefed to those
who have a "need to
kno ' Need to know [
means that the intdligence
is only shared with those
working that specific is-
sue or area. For example,
when I was in the Ann);
stationed in Europe, I
didn't have a "need to
know" what some CIA
agent had collected while
on assignment in China.
Chinese intd was
compartmented and
available only to those
working issues related to
that specific information.
WHAT DOES all this mean? It
means that when our intel agendes brief
the president on an event, information
has been collected from a wide variety
of sources, the information has been
checked for accuracy; it has been com-
pared to other information, and it has
been analyzed. However, intel agendes
can, and often do, get things wrong. For
example, intd missed the Japanese attack
on Pearl Harbor ( 1941 ), the Tet offensive
in Vietnam (1968), the Iranian Revolu-
tion (1979), the collapse ofthe Soviet
Union (1991), the 9-11 attacks (2001),
and the rise of ISIS (2011). Reason for
these failures, while tens of thousands of
smart people work to produce intelli-
gence; our adversaries work equally hard
to deceive us.
DID ASSAD use chemical weapons
on his people? Our intd agendes say
that he did. If he did, it makes little
sense, since President Trump had just
announced that he was planning to
pull US troops out of Syria. Ask who
has the most to gain from a chemical
attack- Assad or rebels fighting against
him? Ifthe rebels could pull offan attack
and blame it on Assad, dearly they have
much to gain. Whether Assad or the
rebels used chemical weapons, the big-
ger question is, "Why should the United
States care?" Yes, chemical weapons
are horrible and using them breaks
intemational law. However, shoot-
ing or beheading civilians is horrible
and breaks international law, as well.
Regardless ofhow they're killed' 40 or 50
dead is horrible. But what's our national
interest in Syria? Assad is a bad gu ; but
so is Kim in North Korea, and dozens
of others around the world. Should we
start bombing them all? Or only when
they use chemical weapons? Or only
when it's in our national interest? Speak-
ing of which, what are our
[ nationalinterests? Hard to
argue that it's Syria.
LOCAL NEWS -
When you think of"low-
incoming housing' (LIH),
what comes to mind? I
think of apartments and
multiple family units
where there is high crime
often associated with high
drug usage. There is an
indisputable link between
low-income housing and
high crime rates. Every-
where there is LIH there are higher
crime rates than similar populated areas
that have owner-occupied' single fam-
ily housing. I tell you this because the
Monroe County Planning and Zoning
(P&Z) Board will hold a public hearing
to discuss/approve a72 unit LIH de-
velopment on New Forsyth Road very
dose to the Bass Pro entrance. Vantage
Development, LLC has applied to build
a 72 trait, multiple family development
on 18+ acres in Bolingbroke. Vantage
specializes in building low-income
housing. Problems that I foresee include
increased crime, increased traffic, and
decreased property values in the sur-
rounding neighborhoods. The P&Z
meeting will be April 23, 5:30 pm, 3rd
floor ofthe County Buildin 38 West
Main Street, Forsyth.
WEEKLY Quote - "Trust but veri ."
Ronald Reagan
Sloan Oliver is a retired Army officer
He lives in Bolingbroke with his wife San-
dra. Email him at sloanolivet@earthlink.
net. ~ - -
