What happens when we all work for the government

This is how it went in Athens yesterday, as club-swinging thugs attacked police because--their parliament is voting to cut back the public payroll! One out of four Greek workers is a government employee. So now one government employee is swinging a club at another in hopes that somehow this will enable the gravy train to roll on forever. It won't. Someone must create value before governments can redistribute it. Blue skies! -- Dan Ford

I love curmudgeons. Jan Morris plays the part today in the WSJ, railing against (of all things!) RMS Titanic! http://ping.fm/rRttc

Why your kid isn't ready for college

I live in a university town, where faculty members are a fairly significant presence on community organizations. So your public library is probably less elevated than ours, and that's a scary thought. Sally Wife picked up a Summer 2011 Reading List from the Durham Public Library the other day in hopes of finding books to recommend to our granddaughters, who live on a boat and who therefore read a lot. Good luck with that, as the children say!

Of twenty books on the list, only three seem remotely worthy. Two of those--Wuthering Heights and Water for Elephants--have recently been filmed, which probably explains their presence on the list; the third is a biography of Benedict Arnold. (This list, by the way, is indicated for students in the eighth grade through seniors in high school.) The others are all of the category called Young Adult, and they all feature dwarfs, "vampyres," Shadowhunters, the Maze, synthetic brains, overpopulated worlds, serial killers, and suchlike concerns of hormone-addled young minds. Here's a sample:

"Cameron Smith, a disaffected sixteen-year-old who, after being diagnosed with mad cow disease, sets off on a road trip with a death-obsessed video gaming dwarf he meets in the hospital in an attempt to find a cure."

Now, it is perfectly possible that some of this dreck is well-written, just some of the spy novels I read in high-school were well-written. But that it should be recommended? God protect us from the guardians of our culture, if this is the best a professional librarian can do. Blue skies! -- Dan Ford

Al Gore's inconvenient truth

Blogger Walter Russell Mead on the former vice-president's oxymoronic crusade against global warming:

You cannot be a leading environmentalist who hopes to lead the general public into a long and difficult struggle for sacrifice and fundamental change if your own conduct is so flagrantly inconsistent with the green gospel you profess. If the heart of your message is that the peril of climate change is so imminent and so overwhelming that the entire political and social system of the world must change, now, you cannot fly on private jets. You cannot own multiple mansions. You cannot even become enormously rich investing in companies that will profit if the policies you advocate are put into place....

A fawning establishment press spares the former vice president the vitriol and schadenfreude it pours over the preachers and priests whose personal conduct compromised the core tenets of their mission; Gore is not mocked as others have been. This gentle treatment hurts both Gore and the greens; he does not know just how disabling, how crippling the gap between conduct and message truly is. The greens do not know that his presence as the visible head of the movement helps ensure its political failure.

The whole essay is worth reading. And it's only part one of what promises to be a two-part roasting. Blue skies! -- Dan Ford

The 178th victory

In a dark hallway of the Sikorski Institute in London, this tail section of a German Junkers bomber sits more or less forgotten. (The engine in front of it doesn't belong to the Ju-88 but to a British Hawker Hurricane fighter.) It is billed as the 178th aircraft shot down by RAF 303 Squadron, known as "Warsaw-Kosciuszko" because it was made up mostly of Polish pilots who'd escaped to France and then to Britain when their own country was invaded and occupied by Germany and Russia. Overall, the Poles were credited with 297 German aircraft destroyed. Their story is most recently told in 303 Squadron: The Legendary Battle of Britain Fighter Squadron, in which the true names of the pilots are given for the first time. (They were previously concealed behind aliases so as to protect their families in occupied Poland.) Blue skies! -- Dan Ford

600 zloty and a bar of soap

When the NKVD arrested the Deszberg family in April 1940, Mama took her treasure box with her into exile. Among the treasures were 600 zloty--several months' wages for a laboring man--and a bar of soap. She couldn't spend the money, which was useless in Siberia, and she never used the soap, which seventy-one years later still retains its faint perfume. Mama wrote on the box that she would open it when she returned to Lwow. She never did, alas. Blue skies! -- Dan Ford

Spent a very emotional afternoon visiting Gunnersbury Cemetery in London, to view the monument to the twenty-two thousand Polish officers and intellectuals murdered at the Katyn Forest near Smolensk on Stalin's order. When the Germans discovered the mass grave in 1942, Stalin of course attributed the murders to them, and the British and American governments to their shame went along with the hoax. Nor was the crime officially acknowledged until the Russians did so, in Gorbachev's time. Then and only then were the Poles permitted to add the year--1940--to the monument in Gunnesbury.

David McCullough not only writes about history but thinks about the teaching of history to our children. What they know, he says, is "comical." The problems include political correctness, the fact that teachers are trained in education rather than in subject matter, and teaching by theme (women, blacks, gays) rather than by chronology. http://ping.fm/TKvwr

The B-17 that crashed in Illinois seems to have been Liberty Belle, owned by the Liberty Foundation and en route to Indianapolis Regional Airport where it was scheduled to give rides for Father's Day. I find sites that variously number the airworthy Flying Fortresses as 12 and 14. Whatever the number, there's one less now. Blue skies! -- Dan Ford

Live in fame or go down in flame

As boys during the Second World War, we sang with gusto the Army Air Corps Hymn, with words whose meaning was quite lost on us: "We'll live in fame / or go down in flame / Nothing can stop the Army Air Corps!" With 1930s engines and tanks full of 115-octane gasoline, every wartime aircraft was a fireball waiting to happen. Here's one of the grand old ladies, a Boeing B-17 Flying Fortress, burning to cinders in a field in Illinois after a (good) emergency landing. Happily the crew and passengers all got out safely. That didn't always happen. Blue skies! -- Dan Ford

The case of the emails that didn't bite in the night

Seventeen news organizations sent their political reporters flying to Juneau to fetch (and I trust pay for) 275 pounds of printouts of Sarah Palin's emails from the few years she was governor of Alaska. That's bad enough, but the New York Times and the Washington Post went a step deeper into the sewers by enlisting their readers to read the emails and play Gotcha! with the results. "Notice the patterns," said the WaPo to its panting volunteers. "Identify recipients and senders. Connect specific emails to larger themes."

Guess what? It was tedious stuff such as any harried bureaucrat-politician might send out. "For her admirers and her detractors alike," concludes Gordon Crovitz in the Wall Street Journal "it turns out that with Mrs. Palin, what you see is what you get."

In a week when we've been deluged with dreck about Anthony Weiner's crotch, that comes as a great relief. I hope the nosy reporters had to pay a surcharge on their baggage, coming home from Juneau. Blue skies! -- Dan Ford

Courting irrelevance

Robert Gates has been a fine Secretary of Defense, and he has done one last service for his country by warning that Europe is courting "collective military irrelevance" by its low level of defense spending. He is of course being polite: Europe is already militarily irrelevant, as it showed in the former Yugoslavia and is showing again in Libya. For sixty-five years, the United States has acted as Europe's defense department, to the point where we now pay 75 percent of NATO's operating costs.

This would matter less if we had another president than Barack Obama, whose fondest wish seems to be to turn the United States into another sweet-tempered European society. Even his military successes (shooting three Somali pirates, assassinating Osama bin Laden) have an ominous tone, showing the same sort of fascination with Special Ops that marked Winston Churchill's management of a declining British military. If you can't put an army in the field, you send a commando team.

Europe has prospered under the American military shield. But whose shield will protect the United States? Blue skies! -- Dan Ford

All the news that fits our politics

There are those who read The Onion to get a laugh out of current events. I read The New York Times. What could be funnier than today's front page online?

Companies Spend on Equipment, Not Workers
By CATHERINE RAMPELL
As the economy recovers, companies’ capital spending is growing faster than their spending on employees, encouraged by tax breaks and falling prices for equipment.

Right! Has nothing to do with Obamacare mandates and fear of higher taxes, of course. The obvious solution: eliminate those tax breaks!

Brash Style Alienates Congressman From Peers
By DAVID W. CHEN and RAYMOND HERNANDEZ
In the fallout of a scandal, Representative Anthony D. Weiner tried to go back to work as usual, even as he faces pressure from colleagues on both sides of the aisle to resign.

Right! It's all about his being brash, isn't it? Nobody is alienated by the fact that a) he's a creep, b) he doesn't have sense enough to control his Twitter, and c) his name is irresistibly funny. Blue skies! -- Dan Ford

How many bureaucrats does it take to dispose of a light bulb?

"Open a window and leave the room for 15 minutes or more. Shut off the central heating and air conditioning system. Carefully scoop up glass fragments and powder using stiff paper or cardboard and place them in a glass jar with a metal lid."

Such are the government's guidelines for disposing of a compact fluorescent light bulb, should you drop one on the kitchen floor. (Evidently all bureaucrats have central air conditioning in their homes.)

Is there any doubt in your mind that, if this were any other object than one mandated by the nanny state, it would be banned as an environmental hazard by the EPA? Yet no less an authority figure than the president of the United States has lent the prestige of his office to phasing out the incandescent bulb, which becomes contraband in the United States on January 1.

CFLs, the president says, will save the average household $50 a year. But of course they won't! At least half the savings will be eaten up by the fact that we'll be less rigorous about turning off the lights. For several years I've had a CFL bulb in the hallway: it burns 24/7. Why not? It's cheap to run, and besides, if I kept turning it on and off, I might break it. Blue skies! -- Dan Ford

From The Gulag Archipelago

I have now read the three English-language volumes of The Gulag Archipelago and have posted my notes online. They have a bias toward the Polish experience. They're on three web pages beginning with www.warbirdforum.com/gulag1.htm
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I particularly liked this quote, from Volume 3, speaking of the Russian prisoners of war who joined the Vlasov army to aid the Germans:

"These people, who had experienced on their own hides twenty-four years of Communist happiness, knew by 1941 what as yet no one else in the world knew: that nowhere on the planet, nowhere in history, was there a regime more vicious, more bloodthirsty, and at the same time more cunning and ingenious than the Bolshevik, the self-styled Soviet regime. That no other regime on earth could compare with it either in the number of those it had done to death, in hardiness, in the range of its ambitions, in its thoroughgoing and unmitigated totalitarianism--no, not even the regime of its pupil Hitler, which at the time blinded Western eyes to all else." p.28

And this, directed toward Communism's western apologists:

"All you freedom-loving 'left-wing' thinkers in the West! You left laborites! You progressive American, German, and French students! As far as you are concerned, none of this amounts to much. As far as you are concerned, this book of mine is a waste of effort. You may suddenly understand it all someday--but only when you yourselves hear 'hands behind your backs there!' and step ashore on our Archipelago." p.518

Blue skies! -- Dan Ford

The Gurkhas live

One of the great rewards of reading Second World War history is stumbling across the exploits of the Gurkhas, "the wee fellows with the kris [knife]"--lads from Nepal who achieved wonders of heroism in British service. By golly, they're still at it! Here is Corporal Dipprasad Pun of the Royal Gurkha Rifles, who received the Conspicuous Gallantry Cross from Elizabeth II. "Pun fired more than 400 rounds, launched 17 grenades and detonated a mine to repel the Taliban assault on his checkpoint near Babaji in Helmand Province, southern Afghanistan, last September." Crikey, what took the Queen so long? Blue skies! -- Dan Ford

He made it worse

As she often does, Peggy Noonan brings wondrous clarity to the Obama presidency in her Saturday column in the Wall Street Journal. (It's available a day earlier online.) She writes about the national debt, and the Republicans' insistence that raising the level must be accompanied by serious cuts, versus the Democrats' insistence that there be no cuts. She writes of the contrast between Bill Clinton, the amiable rogue, and Barack Obama, the cold fish who genuinely hates the other side. And she concludes with this devastating observation:

Two years ago I wrote of Clare Booth Luce's observation that all presidents have a sentence: "He fought to hold the union together and end slavery." "He brought American through economic collapse and a world war." You didn't have to be told it was Lincoln, or FDR. I said [then] that Mr. Obama didn't understand his sentence. But Republicans now think they know it.

Four words: He made it worse.

Obama inherited financial collapse, deficits and debt. He inherited a broken political culture. These things weren't his fault. But through his decisions, he made them all worse.

Blue skies! -- Dan Ford