Survival in the sewers

Their faces are smudged a bit, but considering that they're supposed to have lived in the sewers of Lwow for a year, they're admirably well turned out. The still is from a movie featured at the Telluride Film Festival. In Darkness tells the story of a low-life who hunts Jews for money during the German occupation of Eastern Europe. When he finds one, it seems he gets a better offer than the Ukrainian Nazis have offered him, so he becomes a protector of Jews. (Lwow was Polish in 1939, until Father Stalin intervened and handed it over to the Ukrainians.) And then, I gather, he gets caught up in the challenge, and becomes an Oskar Schindler of the sewers. Blue skies! (as it were) -- Dan Ford

State of the Union in twelve words

"My fellow Americans, the State of the Union is all Bush's fault."

There! I just saved you an excruciating hour of self-justification. I suggest you take the time and watch the DVD of Go Tell the Spartans. Blue skies! -- Dan Ford

Clinging to their guns and secularism

"America is coming apart," writes Charles Murray in the Weekend Journal. What follows is a dispiriting account of what has happened over the past half-century to what used to be called the Middle Class--i.e., the working class. Yet "working" is not the best possible qualifier because, as Mr Murray points out, an astonishing number of working men aren't in the job market at all. It's not that they're unemployed--they're not all that interested in employment! Nor are they much interested in marriage.

But here's the truly astonishing figure in Mr Murray's analysis: 59 percent of white working class males in their thirties and forties don't go to church! So much for "clinging to their guns and religion." Guns, maybe, but church--not so much.

The figures are otherwise familiar and appalling: 65 percent of births to women without a high school diploma are also to women without a husband, as compared to less than 6 percent of those who've graduated from college. Only 48 percent of white working-class males in their prime years are married, compared to 83 percent of upper middle-class men. And so it goes: in almost every respect, America's blue-collar class has separated itself from traditional American values of hard work, church going, family-rearing, tax paying, and upward striving. Blue skies! -- Dan Ford

How many jobs would $7 billion have bought?

President Obama says "Oh heck, no thanks!" to Trans-Canada's proposal to build a seven-billion-dollar pipeline to bring Canadian crude to American refineries. Evidently he thinks there's still enough money to be borrowed from China to pay unemployment benefits to American workers instead.

So what happens now? Canada will build a pipeline to the Pacific coast instead, the crude will go to Asia, and we will continue to import the stuff from Hugo Chavez's US-hating tinpot dictatorship in Venezuela. Our president has, I think, quite lost his mind. He's determined that we shall follow Europe into the rabbit hole, while Canada's economy (never mind Brazil's!) continues to outpace ours. Blue skies! -- Dan Ford

The six-figure bus shelter

You can buy a bus shelter like this one in Grants Pass, Oregon, for $20,000, which seems like a lot--but wait until the the local, state, and federal governments get through with it. It seems that when all regulations are met, each shelter will actually cost $106,000, which as one councilman pointed out is the cost of a basic three-bedroom house in this part of the world. "What we should do is build a house at each station, and if you miss your last bus, you can stay there overnight." Blue skies! -- Dan Ford

Wikigag

First we had Wikipedia, then Wikileaks, and now Wikigag, in which the online encyclopedia has shut down for a day to protest--what, exactly? That the U.S. Congress is considering doing something about internet piracy. Hm. Here's the Wall Street Journal's take on the kerfluffle: "Companies supposedly devoted to the free flow of information are gagging themselves, and the only practical effect will be to enable fraudsters. They've taken no comparable action against, say, Chinese repression." Blue skies! -- Dan Ford

This is going to be wow

I only get twenty free articles a month on the New York Times (I be danged if I am going to pay for propaganda!) and I just wasted my nineteenth on one entitled Wikipedia to go dark on Wednesday I thought it was Wikileaks that was going down! But no matter; the story was good for a laugh.

It seems that in response to the U.S. Congress's temerity in debating an internet piracy act, the Good People are going on strike. "This is going to be wow," said one of Wiki's founders, in the penetrating diction we have come to expect of the wowsters of today. I am reminded of two earlier shutdowns. There was John Galt in Atlas Shrugged; he led America's capitalists on a strike against meddling bureaucrats. Then there was the governmental shut-down during the Reagan administration, in anticipation of which the president quipped: "Let's see if anyone notices!"

Well! Wiki will go dark! Is it wow, or will nobody notice beyond those high-schoolers with book reports due on Thursday? Blue skies! -- Dan Ford