Last night the Cleveland Indians’ American League record 22-game winning streak ended when the Kansas City Royals came from behind to defeat the Tribe, 4-3.  The streak is the second longest winning streak in major league baseball history and is the longest winning streak in more than 100 years.  Here in Northern Ohio, we have hosted a World Series and a 22-game winning streak within a year, which gives us an excellent perspective on the merits of both.  For the rest of you, here are ten reasons why a 22-game winning streak is better than a World Series.

1. The Streak came out of nowhere. Teams that make it to the World Series have almost always played well all season, and in nearly all cases were expected to contend for playoff spots before the season even began.  Nobody expects a 22-game winning streak, even when a team has already won twenty-one in a row.
2. Every game is an elimination game. You can lose three games in the World Series and still win the thing. (Just ask the Cubs.) But there is no margin for error if you’re trying to win every game.
3. Twenty-two is more than twelve. To win the World Series, a baseball team needs to win 12 playoff games if they entered the postseason as a wild card team, or eleven games if they have won their division.  To win 22 games in a row you have to win 22 games.
4. Regular season prices and promotions. A winning streak takes everyone by surprise, including team management. There is no time to raise ticket prices or cancel scheduled promotions. Fireworks, dollar dogs, bobbleheads, and free shirts are still provided. Clearly, this is not the case during the World Series.
5. No rich out-of-towners at the games. During a World Series the ballpark is littered with thousands and thousands of rich out-of-towners who have no interest in the participating teams or in baseball in general. The World Series is an “event,” and the out-of-towners’ purpose in attending is to tell their clients or friends that they were at the World Series. During the streak’s home games, virtually everyone in the ballpark was fervently hoping to see the Indians win. The atmosphere during the games was electric and when they did win, the response was an overwhelming mixture of relief and elation.
6. No obnoxious fans of the visiting team at the games. Unless you are playing the Red Sox or the Yankees, regular season games don’t attract significant numbers of fans of the visiting team. In the World Series, they show up by the planeload. Unlike rich out-of-towners, there is nothing wrong with fans of the visiting team.  At least they know who is playing. But in large numbers they dilute the atmosphere and diminish the shared experience of the home crowd.
7. No attention-seekers at the games. No protestors, counter-protestors, anarchists, neo-Nazis, or Social Justice Warriors show up during a winning streak. No need for armed helicopters hovering overhead, packs of bomb-sniffing dogs, strip searches, or other enhanced security measures. If only that were true during a World Series.
8. Everybody understands a winning streak. You don’t have to understand the infield fly rule or be able to calculate a pitcher’s earned run average to fully appreciate a 22-game winning streak. Doing any positive thing twenty-two times in a row is pretty impressive.
9. There is a World Series winner every year. There is a 22-game winning streak every century.  Even the Indians have won the World Series twice since the last time a team won 22 straight games.
10. No Cubs fans at the games. Similar to Item #6, but clearly bears repeating.

One final note: I live in Cleveland, so I wouldn’t know anything at all about actually winning a World Series.  If by some cosmic miracle that should ever happen here, we might have to reconsider the comparison.

September 16, 2017

In July 2016, the City of Cleveland and the Greater Cleveland community hosted the 2016 Republican National Convention (RNC). It was the first National Special Security Event (NSSE) ever held in Ohio. The Cuyahoga County Office of Emergency Management supported the City of Cleveland throughout the two-year planning process and the one-week event. Overall, it went pretty well, and while we can’t take credit for the good behavior of demonstrators and the excellent weather, we did learn a few things that might help other emergency managers in similar circumstances.

Here are five key things we learned that we wish we had known at the start of the process:

1. Everybody wants to help

Everyone in emergency management knows that spontaneous volunteers are a huge part of managing disasters. The same impulse drives people and agencies to want to help during large-scale scheduled events, including National Special Security Events (NSSE). Throughout the RNC’s two-year planning period we received many more offers of assistance from individuals and agencies than we could possibly accept. In the end, 54 different agencies provided staffing support which allowed us to fill all essential seats in our EOC for the duration of the convention.

2. This is your event, not the federal government’s

At the start of the planning process we looked to federal agencies for guidance and assistance. But over time we realized that the federal government’s role was limited, while ours was not. Eventually, we learned that federal officials were not going to take over the event. They handled their specific responsibilities but they expected us to manage the overall event.

3. Everybody has questions

If you do not conduct events like this routinely, everyone in town will want to know how it will affect them and their organization. You cannot stop the questions so you need to create a place where people can go to get accurate information. You can use a website, a social media site, a telephone information line, or a staffed information desk at the County headquarters, but you need to provide a place for people to find out about road closures, traffic impacts, possible threats, community planning, and a thousand other details. Otherwise, you will be answering the same questions every day for a year.

4. Nobody has answers

Well, nobody has all the answers. Planning for an event of this scale will be fragmented among dozens of federal, state, county, city, and regional agencies. No one agency, and certainly no one person, can possibly keep track of everything. As a result, you will need to dig aggressively for any information that you need. There will be no one-stop shop where you can go to coordinate your efforts with everyone else’s and find critical information. The planning stovepipes – and there are dozens – will never merge.

5. You know how to do this

You may never have planned a national political nominating convention before, but you know how to write a plan and how to prepare for a disaster or a large-scale special event. It was reassuring to us when we realized that no one was going to ask us to do anything that we didn’t already know how to do.

September 30, 2016

One aspect of President Trump’s recent executive order on immigration that has been drowned out by the noise is that the action is more likely to harm American national security than to help it.

This is not some liberal media propaganda point but is, in fact, the overwhelming consensus of national security experts of both parties.

From the time that then-candidate Trump first announced his intent to ban Muslims in late 2015, national defense and homeland security practitioners have warned that such an action would be counterproductive and would strengthen the appeal of ISIS and other radical groups.

Despite administration denials, the order is aimed at Muslim majority nations and has been widely perceived around the world as an attack on Muslims. This perfectly reinforces the ISIS narrative that America is at war with Islam and will only encourage additional persons, both here and abroad, to contemplate action against the United States.

Among the officials who cautioned against the order or criticized it are former Director of Homeland Security Jeh Johnson, former Pentagon Press Secretary Peter Cook (speaking for the Department of Defense), and Senators John McCain (R-Ariz.) and Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.).

This week more than 100 former national security officials from both political parties drafted a letter warning that the president’s executive order will harm America’s national security.

Authors of the letter include former Cabinet secretaries, generals, and high-ranking security and diplomatic officials from Democratic and Republican administrations, including Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, Secretary of Homeland Security Janet Napolitano, National Security Adviser Susan Rice and Director of the CIA Michael Hayden.

Secretary of Defense James Mattis, who was not consulted on the order, has called for exceptions to the ban for Iraqis and Afghans who have assisted U.S. military forces in the fight against terrorism. So far, the administration has not responded, electing, apparently, to betray the trust of persons who risked their lives to assist American soldiers.

Confirming the views of American security experts are former Jihadists, who have now renounced their terrorist past. Speaking to CNN, the former Jihadists said the executive order will boost terrorist recruiting as it reinforces ISIS propaganda. In addition, the order will drive a wedge between Muslims living in the west and their governments, severely hindering efforts to stop terror attacks by persons already living in the west.

Sadly, even if the order does not boost recruitment for ISIS, it will still do nothing to enhance the security of the United States. While “extreme vetting” sounds like something we ought to be doing, our vetting of refugee applicants is already extreme. Applicants for refugee entry into the United States undergo a two-year process that begins with screening by the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, which rejects 99 percent of the applicants. The remaining one percent then undergo interviews by US intelligence and security agencies, extensive background checks and their names, biographic information and fingerprints are run through federal terrorism and criminal databases.

Syrian refugees face additional hurdles. Their documents are placed under extra scrutiny and cross-referenced with classified and unclassified information.

Immigration to the United States for non-refugees is not much easier. Immigration visas (the first step in the multi-year process of becoming a legal resident) are generally issued to reunify families or provide workers for U.S. employers. To obtain an employment-related visa an applicant must have a job arranged in the United States. Most of the qualifying jobs require high levels of education and professional experience. For a family-reunification visa, the applicant must have a parent, spouse or other close relative already living in the United States. Obtaining a visa takes a year or more and can cost as much as $2,000. The process includes one or more interviews, a physical, and a criminal record check.

While our current system is hardly foolproof, it is not a swinging door that foreign terrorist groups can easily exploit. It is already difficult to immigrate to the United States, which is one reason terrorist groups have not succeeded in infiltrating operatives into the U.S. Terror attacks in the U.S. have been carried out by immigrants who became radicalized after their arrival. No amount of vetting, no matter how extreme, would have identified them as terrorists prior to their arrival. Even the 9-11 attacks would not have been prevented, as all the terrorists involved in that attack came from nations not included in the current ban.

So, what is the point of the executive order, if not to enhance security? A tweet by presidential adviser Kellyanne Conway provides a clue. “Promises made, promises kept,” she wrote, following the release of the order.

The administration is eager to please its political supporters, and this order is a no-cost way to fulfill a campaign promise. Of course, it’s an empty gesture that is more likely to harm American security than to help it, but the order only affects a few hundred potential immigrants and refugees, powerless non-voters whose fate is of no concern to anyone in the White House.

As an added benefit, anyone who opposes the order can be called a terrorist sympathizer, reinforcing the administration’s narrative that the president, and the president alone, can keep America safe.

To defeat terrorism, we need to be strong and stay united. Overreacting in fear, abandoning our values, scapegoating our neighbors, and sowing discord among our citizens is the goal of terrorism. We can be better than this.

January 30, 2017

If you want to know what the brightest lights of American commerce think of you, just take a look at your e-mail inbox. It’s a pretty revealing gauge of where you are in your journey from fun-loving free spender to cranky old cheapskate geezer. Maybe today you are getting ads for dating sites, restaurants, concert venues, low-interest car loans, and credit cards. Enjoy it, because these happy days won’t last. Pretty soon you’ll be getting ads for roof repair services, debt consolidation programs (You should have thought more carefully about those credit card ads…), European women looking for American husbands, and life insurance. That’s not so bad, (and now that I think of it, maybe the roof does need some work…) but, alas, this golden age won’t last either. Before you know it, you’ll be getting ads for laser eye surgery, male enhancement products, mole removers, walk-in bathtubs, reverse mortgages, and senior dating services. (At this point, apparently, the potential brides in Kiev have lost interest in you…) Next – and this is where I am now – your inbox will sag with large-print ads for foot-fungus treatments, long-term care insurance, foods that fight dementia, and pre-paid funeral services. I am afraid to imagine what comes next.

July 15, 2017

For people who might not understand how NATO actually works, here is a pretty good description. The key point is that NATO is a mutual defense treaty, not a contract between Europe and the US for defense services. The US military is not a mercenary force that provides defense services to paying customers. Our military is in Europe today because it is in our own interest to be there. No one owes us anything. Keep in mind that the only time NATO nations have deployed in support of a member nation was in 2001 when European nations deployed military forces in support of the United States. I would hope that someone in the administration – Secretary of State? Secretary of Defense? National Security Adviser? anyone? anyone? – would explain this to the President, but I guess that’s not how it works.

That’s not how it works’: Trump’s grasp of Nato questioned

President’s claim that Germany owes the US ‘vast sums of money’ shows a lack of understanding, says ex-Nato representative