Don't go to Harvard; go to prison!

The Wall Street Journal online has a hilarious op-ed about the virtues of enrolling in California's prison-guard academy rather than going to Harvard: you get paid for going, your starting salary after graduation is likely to be higher, and no private enterprise can match California's pension plan. I particularly liked the final paragraph:

The application process may seem like a piece of cake compared to Harvard's, but the correctional officer academy is actually more selective than Harvard. Over 120,000 people apply every year, according to the state Legislative Analyst's Office, but the academy only enrolls about 900. That's an acceptance rate of less than 1%. Harvard's is 6.2%. The job also has a better retention rate than Harvard. Only 1.7% dropped out of the service last year, compared to 2% who left Harvard.

Blue skies! -- Dan Ford

Oops

Micah Zenko has a very discouraging piece in the online magazine Foreign Policy , in which he lays out all the reasons why we goofed in assuming that Britain, France, and the Arab League could topple Qadaffi in "days, not weeks" of U.S. assistance with the no-fly zone. Didn't work out that way, did it? Here's his final, downbeat paragraph:

Qaddafi is most assuredly a vicious tyrant, and his ouster is a worthy goal. But it will not be achieved through incremental aid to the rebels and intermittent decapitation attempts. Yet we are where we are. Given its current level of commitment, the United States should continue to use its military capabilities to support the no-fly zone, monitor and publicize killings of civilians by Qaddafi's forces or the rebels, and respond with direct force to prevent or mitigate any mass atrocities. More importantly, however, the administration should work toward a negotiated end to the civil war, while starting to plan for the U.S. military assets, humanitarian assistance, and financial aid required to keep any peace.

Sounds like the Yugoslavian intervention at best, Iraq at worst. Blue skies! -- Dan Ford

Trading places

I am a great admirer of David Petraeus, but director of Central Intelligence? I'm not so sure about that! Meanwhile, spook chief Leon Panetta becomes Secretary of Defense, presiding over the army, navy, marines, and air force. Huh. In the New York Times, Mark Mazzetti and Eric Schmitt seem to think this is a very fine thing, recognizing as it does "a significant shift over the past decade in how the United States fights its battles — the blurring of lines between soldiers and spies in secret American missions abroad."

Well, perhaps. Or does it just reflect the way Barack Obama does business? My first reaction was: this is weird. My second reaction was, hey, a lot of the stuff Mr. Obama does is weird. (Ordinarily I wouldn't use a lazy word like stuff on a matter of national security, but it does seem to be one of the president's favorite nouns.)

I hope it's not as stupid as it seems. Nixon swapped cabinet secretaries one time, and Dubya also played musical chairs. And look on the bright side: the CIA director wears a suit. That's a good thing, because there's no room on Mr. Petraeus's uniform blouse to add the inevitable medals to the array he already displays. Blue skies! -- Dan Ford

On unequal genders

The New York Times has another of those unintentionally hilarious stories, this one about the terrible problem of how universities are getting around Title Nine, the requirement that men and women participate equally in sports. It seems that, to meet the numbers, some women's teams admit unqualified athletes (think of that!) and some even allow men to join women's teams (which, come to think of it, is the obvious solution to the whole problem: abolish same-sex teams!).

The three-part story goes on and on, piling injustice upon injustice, but I stopped reading at this revelation: "But as women have grown to 57 percent of American colleges’ enrollment, athletic programs have increasingly struggled to field a proportional number of female athletes."

Whoa! Stop right there! There are fifty-seven women on campus for forty-three men? Now, that's inequality we can believe in. Why is there no government program to address it, if only to ensure that all those unqualified women athletes will have someone to hook up with? Blue skies! -- Dan Ford

Singing in the shower

The New York Times last week ran a story entitled Tiger Beat: Still Squeaky Clean After All These Years, about a tweenybopper magazine. (The news angle is that the magazine hasn't gone raunchy, good grief.) Among the covers that illustrated the story was this one, featuring the president as a slumber party idol. One can understand why the NYT thought this was perfectly in order; after all, it loves Mr. Obama the way twelve-year-old girls loved the Beatles. But in fact the cover was a spoof by the Onion. Isn't it wonderful that what brings tears of laughter to consumers of a satirical online magazine causes the oldsters of the NYT to nod their heads solemnly over their chablis? (The newspaper has since run a correction, and has removed the bogus cover from the website.) Blue skies! -- Dan Ford

Happy Spring Sunday!

Today is Spring Sunday, according to the latest in loony political correctness. In Seattle, a teenager volunteering at an elementary school was instructed to use the term spring spheres when she wanted to hand out candy-filled Easter Eggs. (Last month, of course, the upset would have involved the candy! It must be terribly difficult, being a Good Person and keeping up with all the Good Thoughts demanded of one.)

The truly weird thing about this state of mind is that, like Christmas trees, Easter eggs have absolutely nothing to do with the religious holiday to which they have become attached. They already were a secularization of the sacred. Blue skies! -- Dan Ford

On taxing and spending

Here (from the Wall Street Journal) is what our federal government spending looks like, as proposed by the president in February (green line) and as modified by him last week (gray line), and as contrasted to the Republican budget proposed by Paul Ryan (orange line). Gross Domestic Product is the sum of all goods and services created by 300 million Americans. Historically, the federal government has spent one dollar out of five--20 percent of GDP. Last year we boosted that to 25 percent of GDP, a level not reached since the Second World War. Mr. Ryan would like to beat that down to the historical average, but the president will have none of it. He thinks it would be neat to spend somewhere between 22.5 and 24 percent of American wealth every year.

In return for this geyser of spending, what have we gained? The unemployment rate is higher now than when Mr. Obama took office. In terms of the Great Depression, we are now at 1935. If madcap spending didn't work for Franklin Roosevelt, it's highly unlikely to work for Barack Obama. Recall that the United States didn't get out of that tax-and-spend ditch until 1940--that is, 2014 in terms of the Great Recession. Blue skies! -- Dan Ford

Ask not what you can do for your country

"Energy--we haven't talked a lot about energy today, but first of all, $4-a-gallon gas really hurts a lot of people around this country. It's not because they're wasteful, but if you're driving 50 miles to work and that's the only job you can find, and you can't afford some hybrid so you're stuck with the old beater that you're driving around that gets eight miles a gallon, these gas prices are killing you right now." -- Barack Obama, 44th president of the United States of America.

Blue skies! -- Dan Ford

A casualty of war

Shantih (peace) to Tim Hetherington, who was killed on Wednesday along with another photographer in the besieged Libyan city of Misurata. Mr. Hetherington was the director of the excellent Afghan documentary Restrepo. That movie was a joint project between him and Sebastian Junger, who wrote of him: "working with Tim was like climbing into a little sports car and driving around really, really fast." Pity it had to crash!

Mr. Junger's contribution to their joint legacy was a superlative book with a simple and eloquent title: War. Blue skies! -- Dan Ford

Shame on you, Dan Duffy!

This is Dan Duffy. He is the police chief of Scranton, Pennsylvania, and he has just violated the terms of his employment: on his day off, he arrested a man with a joint! No, it's not that Scranton is a sanctuary town for druggies. Mr. Duffy's offense is that he is management, and the Scranton police have a union, and they don't want managers doing workers' jobs for fear the city won't need as many cops on the beat. So they've filed a grievance against him.  "[T]he union president said the chief, as member of management, should not actively root out crime or randomly patrol neighborhoods while off duty because it violates union agreements that protect rank-and-file officers' employment. The union is concerned city administrators will have more leverage to lay off police officers because 'Chief Duffy will step in' and do the work, Sgt. [Bob] Martin said." You can see why they're not worried that he might fight crime while actually on the job: nine to five, he's probably too busy handling union grievances. Blue skies! -- Dan Ford

Posted without comment

Blue skies! (not so blue, actually) -- Dan Ford

Spending reductions in the tax code

I haven't listened to the president's speeches for the past couple of years, because they remind me of how stupid I was to have voted for him in the 2008 New Hampshire primary. Comedian Jon Stewart points out that I thereby missed a particularly fine piece of political sophistry, where Mr. Obama explained Wednesday evening that he was going to reduce the deficit through "spending reductions in the tax code." This is how Mr. Stewart riffed on that bit of bafflegab:

What? “Spending reductions in the tax code”? The tax code isn’t where we spend, it’s where we collect, and that…. ohhhhhhhhhhhhhhh. I guess what you said is tax “code”, code for raising taxes. You managed to talk about a tax hike as a spending reduction. Can we afford that and the royalty checks you’re going to have to send to George Orwell? That’s the weirdest way of… just say “tax hike”! That’s like saying, “I’m not going on a diet, I’m going to add calories to my excluded food intake!”

Blue skies! -- Dan Ford

Shirley Temple in Siberia

I am writing about the odyssey of a Polish girl through Russia, the Middle East, and England during the 1940s. One of her childhood memories is of going to the movies in Lwow and seeing Shirley Temple eat spaghetti. (That would have been Poor Little Rich Girl).

Presumably because of that adventure, she acquired a Shirley Temple doll, and when the NKVD put her on a cattle car to Siberia, of course she took the doll with her. Almost certainly this is the doll--well, not the very same doll, but a sibling. It was manufactured in Poland in the 1930s, and it has blonde hair rather than the brown hair of the original (and of all American Shirley Temple dolls). When I sent her a photo of a typical doll, she that she remembered hers as having lighter hair ("and more bedraggled, naturally"). Gosh, I love discoveries like this! Blue skies! -- Dan Ford

Term limits for Cuba

The New York Times has one of those unintentionally funny articles this morning, in which Raul Castro proposes dramatic new changes "to lift the island out of economic despair and stagnant thinking." Huh? Isn't that what Fidel is supposed to have done in 1959? Well, better late than never! Among the proposals: limit politicians to two five-year terms.

Pity they couldn't be made retroactive. Blue skies! -- Dan Ford

Operation Unthinkable

I am enjoying Max Hastings's Winston's War: Churchill, 1940-1945. The most entrancing bit so far is Operation Unthinkable: in May 1945, Churchill ordered up a study of what it would take for the British, the Americans, and the Germans (!) to roll back the Red Army far enough to liberate Poland. When the chiefs of staff assured him that the notion was indeed Unthinkable, Churchill ordered up another study, this one to determine whether Britain could repel a Russian invasion, assuming the Americans pulled out of Europe and the Red Army advanced into France. Churchill, it seems, had a much clearer view of the Soviet Union than any of his contemporaries (or indeed than many of our contemporaries). Blue skies! -- Dan Ford

On bending in the right direction

Congratulations to the US Congress for bending the budget (and President Obama) in the right direction. We are still piling trillion upon trillions of dollars onto the national debt, but we've taken a small step toward reversing the trend: domestic discretionary spending will drop 4 percent this year, after having grown 6 percent in 2008, 11 percent in 2009, and 14 percent in 2010.

It's a start. Blue skies! -- Dan Ford

Food, fuel, and prices

The NYT has a sad (though amusing) story this morning about the unintended (but inevitable) consequence of using food for fuel: the price goes up.

The starchy cassava root has long been an important ingredient in everything from tapioca pudding and ice cream to paper and animal feed.

But last year, 98 percent of cassava chips exported from Thailand, the world’s largest cassava exporter, went to just one place and almost all for one purpose: to China to make biofuel. Driven by new demand, Thai exports of cassava chips have increased nearly fourfold since 2008, and the price of cassava has roughly doubled.

Perhaps you've never topped off a meal with tapioca pudding. It was a staple in our house in the 1940s, because it was cheap. Similarly, people throughout the southern hemisphere dine on cassava root the way we in the north eat potato, because it's a good source of starch and is--or used to be--cheap. No longer! Like children discovering the human hands that animate the puppet show, the New York Times discovers a law of economics: increased demand leads to higher prices.

But with food prices rising sharply in recent months, many experts are calling on countries to scale back their headlong rush into green fuel development, arguing that the combination of ambitious biofuel targets and mediocre harvests of some crucial crops is contributing to high prices, hunger and political instability.

Gosh, imagine that. Blue skies! -- Dan Ford

Voici la nouvelle superpuissance

For more than sixty years, the United States has played the role of the world's SWAT team. Now that Barack Obama has abdicated that role, the question has been who: who will step in? To my astonishment and relief, it hasn't been Russia, nor China, but--Vive la France! At this moment, the French military is engaged in Libya, Ivory Coast, and Afghanistan. (Above: Libyan rebels wave the French flag over a destroyed Gadafi tank.) France has always had a tough military and (unlike the US) a particular willingness to meddle in Africa.

Nick Witney of the European Council on Foreign Relations noted that acting quickly might have avoided a deeper shame with political consequences. “You might not reap popularity for taking action, but if we all stood by and watched a bloodbath in Benghazi, you might be slaughtered by public opinion,” he said. “After saying Qaddafi must go, if he’d crushed the opposition it would have been a huge embarrassment for the West.”

Indeed. Blue skies! -- Dan Ford

A man of God, and a murderer by extension

I wish I could think of a punishment suitable for the despicable Florida pastor who caused the death of seven UN workers in Afghanistan. This sicko creep burned a Koran in a pseudo-religious ritual, thus inspiring (as almost certainly was his purpose) a mob to storm a virtually undefended compound and to murder a Swede, a Norwegian, a Romanian, and four Nepalese workers.

Then he had the unmitigated gall to call for the Afghans to be punished! So they should be, but of course they won't. And so should he be, but of course he won't. He will hide behind the Constitution, for which he clearly doesn't care a fig, like a little bully hiding behind his mother's skirts and sticking his tongue out at the other boys. It's enough to make me wish I believed in an afterlife. God, I assume, is not bound by the U.S. Constitution, and He would surely assign the Pastor to burn eternally in Hell. Blue skies! -- Dan Ford

Here's an idea: a constitutional dictatorship!

Like a rotten log rolled over, the government of Libya keeps offering new surprises, as the insects scurry to find new and safer positions. Now that the wonderfully named Moussa Koussa has "defected" to England, Col Gadhafi is said to rely more and more upon his sons, much like the late Saddam Hussein in Iraq. And, like Saddam, Gadhafi has a whole bunch of sons. Now two of them have offered a suggestion that for chutzpah exceeds anything that Saddam ever proposed: they'll shove the old man aside and themselves preside over Libya as it transitions to democracy.

Right! Call it a constitutional dictatorship: members of the family will take turns at repressing Libya. No doubt some of Gadafi's seven sons themselves have sons, and so on. They can keep passing the dictatorship down from generation to generation, all the while abiding by the new constitution. Blue skies! -- Dan Ford

Fun and games with Apple

For the second time in a year, iTunes has wiped out my iPhone and made it inoperable. From bitter experience, I know that it will take me a day or two of work to get it functioning again, whereupon I will find that all my music etc has vanished and must either be recreated from scratch or else picked up from various hiding places on my computer.

Before becoming involved with Apple, I used to think that Rosemary's Baby had grown up to become Bill Gates. Now I know that he is actually Steve Jobs. Blue skies! -- Dan Ford

(Later: well, it took four hours, but on the other hand I only lost some audio lectures that I think I can easily replace.)

On taking in each other's washing

Steven Moore has a truly terrifying article in the Wall Street Journal on the subject of government employment.

• Today in America there are nearly twice as many people working for the government (22.5 million) as in all of manufacturing (11.5 million)

• More Americans work for the government than work in construction, farming, fishing, forestry, manufacturing, mining and utilities combined

• Every state in America today except Indiana and Wisconsin has more government workers on the payroll than people manufacturing industrial goods

• California has 2.4 million government employees, twice as many as people at work in manufacturing; New Jersey has just under two-and-a-half as many government employees as manufacturers; Florida and New York each has a ratio of more than three to one

• Iowa and Nebraska are farm states, but each has at least five times more government workers than farmers

We regularly hear about the pyramid scheme of Social Security, in which an ever-growing pool of retirees is supported by an ever-shrinking pool of workers. But we naively think that the workers, at least, are productive. That's becoming less and less true, as more and more people work instead for the government, in effect doing nothing more productive than washing their neighbors' laundry, while the neighbors in turn do theirs. To say the least, this is not a recipe for future greatness. Blue skies! -- Dan Ford

What price global warming?

It is April first, the lawn is once again white, and the Weather Underground has this to say about our day:

Today
Snow. Snow will be heavy at times. Snow accumulation of 5 to 10 inches. Isolated thunderstorms. Highs in the lower 30s. North winds 10 to 15 mph...becoming northwest this afternoon. Gusts up to 30 mph. Chance of snow near 100 percent.

Blue skies! -- Dan Ford