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Chelsea's email to B & H about her experience in Haiti is an informative read. I had assumed our disaster mitigation/rescue NGOs were a lot more effective than

Chelsea's email to B & H about her experience in Haiti is an informative read. I had assumed our disaster mitigation/rescue NGOs were a lot more effective than they actually are. They sound pretty awful, reading that email.

argonaut 11y ago
Yeah. Someone I know who briefly worked at the UN had some interesting stories about incompetence and politics where factional lines were drawn by nationality.
- orbitingpluto 11y ago
  I got sat next to a CIDA worker at a wedding. She talked about her duties ensuring that a Canadian agency head was provided with adequate and hygienic toilets in Haiti. Reports included trips to various places and pictures of each possible crapper along the way. Tax dollars at work... Can you imagine being the lead team on that? The existential ennui alone about the pointlessness of it all. edit:forgot to mention that it was Haiti, acronym is CIDA, not CANAID
  - ethbro 11y ago
    The late Michael Hastings' The Operators was a good read if you find the sausage making process interesting. He has a strong viewpoint, but stories of Gen McChrystal throwing out ISAF functionaries from plush offices and closing officer bars at the Kabul ISAF headquarters were fairly humorous. There were overriding politics between superiors, but the irony is that McChrystal, any infeasible strategy aside, got thrown out for showing distain for the same wasteful, corrupt system that everyone else gripes about.
    - hackuser 11y ago
      > McChrystal ... got thrown out for showing distain for the same wasteful, corrupt system that everyone else gripes about. OT: IIRC he resigned after he and his staff openly mocked to a journalist the President, VP and others in the chain of command, and their comments were published in Rolling Stone. That's not an effort to end corruption, it's insubordination, apparently widespread in his staff under his leadership, which itself is a form of corruption. http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/17390/119236 http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/17390/119236
      - ethbro 11y ago
        From the article (which is partially reproduced and fleshed out with additional chapters in the book) a lot of the mocking seemed to concern involvement: "Their first one-on-one meeting took place in the Oval Office four months later, after McChrystal got the Afghanistan job, and it didn't go much better. 'It was a 10-minute photo op,' says an adviser to McChrystal. 'Obama clearly didn't know anything about him, who he was. Here's the guy who's going to run his fucking war, but he didn't seem very engaged. The Boss [McChrystal] was pretty disappointed.'" And for what it's worth, when you're dealing with things like this: "In February, the day before the doomed offensive in Marja, McChrystal even drove over to the president's palace to get him to sign off on what would be the largest military operation of the year. Karzai's staff, however, insisted that the president was sleeping off a cold and could not be disturbed. After several hours of haggling, McChrystal finally enlisted the aid of Afghanistan's defense minister, who persuaded Karzai's people to wake the president from his nap." Then I'd probably be in a less than charitable mood concerning the entire enterprise. To repeat, they had to argue with the staff of the president of the country whose insurgency we were fighting that being involved in starting a long-planned and massive offensive was more important than a nap. (And that's not getting into the comments about drug use) Biden was exactly right, the entire thing was a cluster%^@# and a terrible idea to invest more in. But in the absence of a resolute US president who tells the military "No, you can't send in more troops"? Well, the military's going to do what it does: fight. And press for more fighting. PS: The amount of backstabbing between different military cliques, Congress, different cliques in the State Department, and the Executive staff was also mind boggling.
        hackuser 11y ago
        > I'd probably be in a less than charitable mood concerning the entire enterprise. I don't blame him for his mood but I do for his actions. He's a general running a major operation; millions of lives and the welfare of nations depend on him; those are the responsibilities and stakes. He can't undermine the enterprise because he feels like complaining to a reporter.
  - greggman 11y ago
    I assume you think that's a bad thing? If I had someone planning where I was going to stay I would tell them, put me anywhere that has a quiet comfortable bed and a clean private comfortable toilet. Maybe there's more to this story?
    - orbitingpluto 11y ago
      Careful, your privilege is showing. edit: Seriously on the downvotes? If your job is to travel to another country to render aid because of conditions caused by your own country sending troops to facilitate a coup, and then you send your underlings to make sure you have golden toilets on your visit, then something is messed up. If you can't see that and you're downvoting me for it, congrats, you are the problem.
      - leroy_masochist 11y ago
        > If your job is to travel to another country to render aid because of conditions caused by your own country sending troops to facilitate a coup... One of these days we'll hold the Canadians accountable for their wanton coup-facilitation and unreasonable toilet-related demands.
jedberg 11y ago
The other interesting piece of information is the incredible amount of access Chelsea gets given her experience level. Obviously, her connections have helped her. In her defense though, she seems to be living up to it.
- AndrewKemendo 11y ago
  You mean the offspring of powerful people has undue influence? Call the press.
  - gameshot911 11y ago
    'Undue' as defined how?
    - AndrewKemendo 11y ago
      Unwarranted or unjustifiable.
      - gameshot911 11y ago
        By that I meant not "what is the definition of undue", but rather, why is the "offspring of powerful people having [extra] influence" undue? By what metric do you define the level of influence that is appropriate to any one person? And separately, how are we to determine whether the child of a powerful person doesn't have just the right amount of influence per that metric, and it's just a coincidence that their parent is powerful in their own right?
        hueving 11y ago
        Any influence granted through parental connections rather than one forged on your own are undue.
- jonknee 11y ago
  Wouldn't it be more shocking if her daughter didn't have access to her own mother?
Fuzzwah 11y ago
Here's a direct link to the email, to save anyone else having to search for it: http://graphics.wsj.com/hillary-clinton-email-documents/pdfs/C05774218.pdf http://graphics.wsj.com/hillary-clinton-email-documents/pdfs...
nl 11y ago
Such a terrible mess. All is logistics, and no one except armies recognize that.
Mtinie 11y ago
I never really had an opinion about Chelsea Clinton, one way or another, but after reading that email I respect her.
- MicroBerto 11y ago
  It was incredibly well-written. Much respect to her. You can tell that she is the kind of person that demands action and hates any kind of BS. Very business like. This is also why you should always write emails assuming they're public record. Because one day... They just might be!
  - hueving 11y ago
    It was quite 'over-written', if that's even a term. The sentences were very dense with long compound sentences. Maybe I'm just stupid, but I feel like it's a failure on her part to drown the reader in text with a low readability score that isn't even jargon.
    - gizmo686 11y ago
      In fairness to her, her preamble explicitly stated that it was written hastily and without revision, and she did explicitly ask that, if it was to be shared, her name not be attached to it.
    - SixSigma 11y ago
      > As is often said, if I had more time - and less emotion - I would have written a shorter letter.
- arikrak 11y ago
  Chelsea vs. George P Bush 2024.
  - branchless 11y ago
    Go American democracy! What a joke...
ForHackernews 11y ago
Yeah, NPR/Propublica published a massive exposé about this a while back: https://www.propublica.org/article/how-the-red-cross-raised-half-a-billion-dollars-for-haiti-and-built-6-homes https://www.propublica.org/article/how-the-red-cross-raised-... They used $500,000,000 to build six houses. No, that's not a typo.
JackFr 11y ago
http://www.povertyinc.org/ http://www.povertyinc.org/ You’ll never look at poverty and the Third World the same again. — Michael Moore, Filmmaker Moving. I confess there were parts where I cried. — Russ Roberts, EconTalk You made me so proud to be an African woman.  Thank you for the brutal but necessary and empowering truth. — Dany Masado, Health Professional | Cameroon
bawana 11y ago
This email epitomizes what all organizations tend to become. As they grow, they need to find ways to grow themselves bigger - and they CANNOT do that if they are solving the problem. Thus organizations develop many ways to justify their growth without doing anything - for example - use more words and do less work. As result T-shirts and latrines do not get delivered and lengthy emails clog the bandwidth.

argonaut 11y ago

Yeah. Someone I know who briefly worked at the UN had some interesting stories about incompetence and politics where factional lines were drawn by nationality.

orbitingpluto 11y ago
I got sat next to a CIDA worker at a wedding. She talked about her duties ensuring that a Canadian agency head was provided with adequate and hygienic toilets in Haiti. Reports included trips to various places and pictures of each possible crapper along the way. Tax dollars at work... Can you imagine being the lead team on that? The existential ennui alone about the pointlessness of it all. edit:forgot to mention that it was Haiti, acronym is CIDA, not CANAID
- ethbro 11y ago
  The late Michael Hastings' The Operators was a good read if you find the sausage making process interesting. He has a strong viewpoint, but stories of Gen McChrystal throwing out ISAF functionaries from plush offices and closing officer bars at the Kabul ISAF headquarters were fairly humorous. There were overriding politics between superiors, but the irony is that McChrystal, any infeasible strategy aside, got thrown out for showing distain for the same wasteful, corrupt system that everyone else gripes about.
  - hackuser 11y ago
    > McChrystal ... got thrown out for showing distain for the same wasteful, corrupt system that everyone else gripes about. OT: IIRC he resigned after he and his staff openly mocked to a journalist the President, VP and others in the chain of command, and their comments were published in Rolling Stone. That's not an effort to end corruption, it's insubordination, apparently widespread in his staff under his leadership, which itself is a form of corruption. http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/17390/119236 http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/17390/119236
    - ethbro 11y ago
      From the article (which is partially reproduced and fleshed out with additional chapters in the book) a lot of the mocking seemed to concern involvement: "Their first one-on-one meeting took place in the Oval Office four months later, after McChrystal got the Afghanistan job, and it didn't go much better. 'It was a 10-minute photo op,' says an adviser to McChrystal. 'Obama clearly didn't know anything about him, who he was. Here's the guy who's going to run his fucking war, but he didn't seem very engaged. The Boss [McChrystal] was pretty disappointed.'" And for what it's worth, when you're dealing with things like this: "In February, the day before the doomed offensive in Marja, McChrystal even drove over to the president's palace to get him to sign off on what would be the largest military operation of the year. Karzai's staff, however, insisted that the president was sleeping off a cold and could not be disturbed. After several hours of haggling, McChrystal finally enlisted the aid of Afghanistan's defense minister, who persuaded Karzai's people to wake the president from his nap." Then I'd probably be in a less than charitable mood concerning the entire enterprise. To repeat, they had to argue with the staff of the president of the country whose insurgency we were fighting that being involved in starting a long-planned and massive offensive was more important than a nap. (And that's not getting into the comments about drug use) Biden was exactly right, the entire thing was a cluster%^@# and a terrible idea to invest more in. But in the absence of a resolute US president who tells the military "No, you can't send in more troops"? Well, the military's going to do what it does: fight. And press for more fighting. PS: The amount of backstabbing between different military cliques, Congress, different cliques in the State Department, and the Executive staff was also mind boggling.
      - hackuser 11y ago
        > I'd probably be in a less than charitable mood concerning the entire enterprise. I don't blame him for his mood but I do for his actions. He's a general running a major operation; millions of lives and the welfare of nations depend on him; those are the responsibilities and stakes. He can't undermine the enterprise because he feels like complaining to a reporter.
- greggman 11y ago
  I assume you think that's a bad thing? If I had someone planning where I was going to stay I would tell them, put me anywhere that has a quiet comfortable bed and a clean private comfortable toilet. Maybe there's more to this story?
  - orbitingpluto 11y ago
    Careful, your privilege is showing. edit: Seriously on the downvotes? If your job is to travel to another country to render aid because of conditions caused by your own country sending troops to facilitate a coup, and then you send your underlings to make sure you have golden toilets on your visit, then something is messed up. If you can't see that and you're downvoting me for it, congrats, you are the problem.
    - leroy_masochist 11y ago
      > If your job is to travel to another country to render aid because of conditions caused by your own country sending troops to facilitate a coup... One of these days we'll hold the Canadians accountable for their wanton coup-facilitation and unreasonable toilet-related demands.

jedberg 11y ago

The other interesting piece of information is the incredible amount of access Chelsea gets given her experience level. Obviously, her connections have helped her. In her defense though, she seems to be living up to it.

AndrewKemendo 11y ago
You mean the offspring of powerful people has undue influence? Call the press.
- gameshot911 11y ago
  'Undue' as defined how?
  - AndrewKemendo 11y ago
    Unwarranted or unjustifiable.
    - gameshot911 11y ago
      By that I meant not "what is the definition of undue", but rather, why is the "offspring of powerful people having [extra] influence" undue? By what metric do you define the level of influence that is appropriate to any one person? And separately, how are we to determine whether the child of a powerful person doesn't have just the right amount of influence per that metric, and it's just a coincidence that their parent is powerful in their own right?
      - hueving 11y ago
        Any influence granted through parental connections rather than one forged on your own are undue.
jonknee 11y ago
Wouldn't it be more shocking if her daughter didn't have access to her own mother?

Fuzzwah 11y ago

Here's a direct link to the email, to save anyone else having to search for it: http://graphics.wsj.com/hillary-clinton-email-documents/pdfs/C05774218.pdf http://graphics.wsj.com/hillary-clinton-email-documents/pdfs...

nl 11y ago

Such a terrible mess. All is logistics, and no one except armies recognize that.

Mtinie 11y ago

I never really had an opinion about Chelsea Clinton, one way or another, but after reading that email I respect her.

MicroBerto 11y ago
It was incredibly well-written. Much respect to her. You can tell that she is the kind of person that demands action and hates any kind of BS. Very business like. This is also why you should always write emails assuming they're public record. Because one day... They just might be!
- hueving 11y ago
  It was quite 'over-written', if that's even a term. The sentences were very dense with long compound sentences. Maybe I'm just stupid, but I feel like it's a failure on her part to drown the reader in text with a low readability score that isn't even jargon.
  - gizmo686 11y ago
    In fairness to her, her preamble explicitly stated that it was written hastily and without revision, and she did explicitly ask that, if it was to be shared, her name not be attached to it.
  - SixSigma 11y ago
    > As is often said, if I had more time - and less emotion - I would have written a shorter letter.
arikrak 11y ago
Chelsea vs. George P Bush 2024.
- branchless 11y ago
  Go American democracy! What a joke...

ForHackernews 11y ago

Yeah, NPR/Propublica published a massive exposé about this a while back: https://www.propublica.org/article/how-the-red-cross-raised-half-a-billion-dollars-for-haiti-and-built-6-homes https://www.propublica.org/article/how-the-red-cross-raised-... They used $500,000,000 to build six houses. No, that's not a typo.

JackFr 11y ago

http://www.povertyinc.org/ http://www.povertyinc.org/ You’ll never look at poverty and the Third World the same again. — Michael Moore, Filmmaker Moving. I confess there were parts where I cried. — Russ Roberts, EconTalk You made me so proud to be an African woman.  Thank you for the brutal but necessary and empowering truth. — Dany Masado, Health Professional | Cameroon

bawana 11y ago

This email epitomizes what all organizations tend to become. As they grow, they need to find ways to grow themselves bigger - and they CANNOT do that if they are solving the problem. Thus organizations develop many ways to justify their growth without doing anything - for example - use more words and do less work. As result T-shirts and latrines do not get delivered and lengthy emails clog the bandwidth.