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

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

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

A Bohunk in the Ivory Tower

Danusha Goska, an American of blue-collar Polish parentage, blogs scathingly about her experience as a college student, graduate student, and faculty member in an academic world given over to any minority except the one she represents:

There are offices on campus devoted to African American students, gay students, Hispanic students, Native American students, international students, returning women students, veteran students, physically handicapped students, cognitively impaired students … there are special scholarships, parties, speakers, monies, procedures, counselors, deans, days, cafeteria tables, recruiters, retention experts, dedicated to making all of the aforementioned students' lives easier, their graduation assured, and their post-graduation employment a cinch.

There is no campus office for me, or others like me, though, poor, white Christian ethnics are among the most discriminated against and unwelcome students on elite campuses like this one.

That sounds about right to me. My own background was rather similar to hers, save that my parents were Irish instead of Polish. And with one other, crucial difference: I was a student in the 1950s, before America began to obsess over designated, privileged minorities. I particularly liked Danusha's anecdote of having to work as a domestic servant in order to earn the money that a middle-class classmate got in grants simply because of the color of her skin. Blue skies! -- Dan Ford

Couldn't stand another of those Vermont winters!

In the 1930s, when I was a babe, the population of the United States was 130 million and there was a clever joke at the expense of the Vermont farmer who was told that the state line had shifted, so that he now lived in New Hampshire. "Thank goodness," he said. "I couldn't have stood another of those Vermont winters!"

Some things change, some don't. The population of the U.S. is now 300 million, but progressive Vermonters are still fleeing across the line to their low-tax, redneck neighbor. Between 2000 and 2010, New Hampshire grew at more than double the rate of Vermont--indeed, double the rate of the rest of the New England states.

The catch, of course, is that most of the newcomers are precisely the same Good People who drove up the taxes in Vermont, Maine, and especially Massachusetts. And now that they are here, they're voting for the same Wouldn't It Be Nice If... projects that got their home states into trouble. Blue skies! - Dan Ford

On bowing to foreign opinion II

Bernard Shaw said there are two tragedies in life: one being not to get your heart's desire, and the other, to get it. Barack Obama entered office with a heart full of desires, including an end to what the historians call the myth of American exceptionalism. He went around the world, apologizing for his predecessors. We have sinned, he admitted! We are a nation like any other! Well, of course the world took him at his word. As a result, he went to the G-20 summit and got sand kicked in his face. He couldn't even get the Koreans to sign the trade agreement that the Bush administration negotiated three years ago, and that was blocked in the Congress by Nancy Pelosi!

This is very popular in the faculty lounge, but it will cost us dearly over the years, as European automobiles enter South Korea at more favorable terms than those from Ford and General Motors.... Oh, and did you catch the news that a Chinese automaker hopes to take 16 percent of those GM shares soon to go on the market, heavily subsidized by your taxes? Blue skies! -- Dan Ford

On maintaining the nation

I've always thought of the United States as a man on a bicycle (well, better make that a person on a bicycle). He does great as long as he keeps moving. Stopping, however, is an awkward business, especially as one gets older.

Lately I get the impression that the American bicycle is finally coming to a stop. (Perhaps that's why we favor long-legged presidents?) The reasons are many, but one of them is entirely self-inflicted: we're jettisoning the culture that got us this far. The other day in the Wall Street Journal, Tony Blair expressed it beautifully. Muslims were on his mind, but they are or ought to be on our minds as well, and anyhow muslims are a fair stand-in for the entire multi-culti stew:

But there has to be a shared acceptance that some things we believe in and we do together: obedience to certain values like democracy, rule of law, equality between men and women; respect for national institutions; and speaking the national language. This common space cannot be left to chance or individual decision. It has to be accepted as mandatory.

Amen. Blue skies! -- Dan Ford

On citizenship

It's now official: you needn't be a citizen in order to vote! Says the New York Times in one of the shortest news stories of the week (copied in its entirety):

A three-judge panel of the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit struck down a state law that requires people to provide proof of American citizenship to register to vote, saying the law conflicts with the federal National Voter Registration Act. Nina Perales, national senior counsel for the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund, said that few illegal immigrants tried to register, but that 30,000 citizens had been rejected for registration under the law, which voters passed in 2004.

One of the judges on that panel, as I learned elsewhere, was my former favorite justice, Sandra Day O'Connor. What am I missing here? If a state may not require its citizens to be citizens before they can vote, what the hell does citizenship mean? Blue skies! -- Dan Ford

On bombing Iran

I've always assumed that when Iran's nuclear program got so far along that bombs were an inevitable product, the Israelis would blast the facilities out of existence, as it has done to other nations in the past. Not so fast, says Kenneth Pollack in The National Interest:

Most American (and Israeli) nuclear experts now think that Tehran is so far along that it could rebuild the entire program and be back to where it is at present in just a year or two. And many already fear that Iran has secret facilities, or is hiding key machinery and material for its nuclear program—then the program wouldn’t be set back much at all by a military campaign.

It is also worth keeping in mind that Iran probably will retaliate against the United States.... The Islamic Republic has a formidable capacity to employ terrorism and a lot of allies, like Hezbollah and Palestinian Islamic Jihad, who could also cause a great deal of damage on Tehran’s behalf. If there is anyone out there who might be able to replicate a terrorist attack as terrible as 9/11, it is Iran.

Sanctions, he thinks, have a better chance of success--but tougher sanctions, allied with covert action and a greater emphasis on human rights. South Africa is the model here: the whole world was ready to dump on South Africa, especially the Good People, not for its nukes but for the odiousness of its regime. Worth a read. Blue skies! -- Dan Ford

Requiem for the buck

I ordered a pair of ski poles yesterday, and when I clicked on the Confirm button, it occurred to me that the price ($129) was more than what I paid for my first pair of metal skis, which I bought second hand at a ski shop in Littleton NH. That was of course before the Great Inflation of the 1970s, which turned our dollars into dimes. Lyndon Johnson wanted a Great Society plus a war, and the only way to pay for that was to print greenbacks. "It's our currency, but it's your problem," his Treasury secretary John Connally said to the Europeans when we exported our inflation to them. (By that time, Mr. Connally was Richard Nixon's Treasury secretary: inflation takes a while to work through the system.) Now I habitually move the decimal one place to the left when pricing things. Gasoline at $2.74? Not bad! That's actually cheaper than the 29.9 cents I paid to put a gallon in my Volkswagen Beetle.

Now we have another president whose ambitions are higher than the nation's ability (or anyhow willingness) to pay for them. The solution of course will be to flood the world with greenbacks. The gold bugs have already bid the price of their pretty metal up to $1300 an ounce; it was $35 when Mr. Nixon closed the door to Fort Knox and unhinged the dollar from reality. Can $3,500 be far off? Then I'll be moving the decimal point two places left. Gasoline at $28 a gallon is the legacy we'll leave to our children. Blue skies! -- Dan Ford
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Roughnecks to the rescue

Reports the Associated Press from San Jose, Chile:

Jeff Hart was drilling water wells for the U.S. Army's forward operating bases in Afghanistan when he got the call to fly to Chile.
He spent the next 33 days on his feet, operating the drill that finally provided a way out Saturday for 33 trapped miners.
"You have to feel through your feet what the drill is doing; it's a vibration you get so that you know what's happening," explained Hart, a contractor from Denver, Colorado.

That's Mr. Hart at left above; on the right is Matt Staffel. Both are from Denver, and if the Chilean miners escape from their tomb this week, it will be in large part thanks to them and their drilling skills.

There was a time when American roughnecks to the rescue was standard fare in newspapers, on television, and in movies. Now it's a rarity. Is that because Americans have changed, or the media? Blue skies! -- Dan Ford

Would you like fries with that?

This enchanting photo appeared in the Wall Street Journal yesterday. What we see here is one of 105 drive-through McDonald's fast-food restaurants now open for business in China, with 100 more planned for each of the next three years.

It's all part of China's discovery of the joys of the automotive culture. The country has built 30,000 miles of expressways in the past ten years. Chinese households and businesses bought 13.6 million vehicles in 2009, substantially more than the 10.4 sold in the U.S. (which, to be sure, was the smallest deluge of autos and light trucks in 27 years). China is now the world's largest automotive market, though it will take a while before the number of cars on China's roads approaches those in the United States.

All of which is grist for the doomsayers who predict that China is about to replace the U.S. as the world's dominant economy. Yet the odd thing about this supposed transition is that, when America took off in the 1950s, it was creating something never seen in the world before. China by contrast is more or less replicating what happened here half a century ago. Does that mean that nothing new will ever happen again, and that the whole world is about to be Americanized? Blue skies! -- Dan Ford
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And it's rated PG!

Blue skies! -- Dan Ford

Bring me your poor!

Lately I've been bugged by this photo as a full-page advertisement in The New Yorker and the Wall Street Journal. On the left is somebody named Ali; on the right is the rock star Bono, who I am pretty sure is not the late Sonny Bono, who for all his faults at least had the decency to employ two names. The lightplane in the background looks like a contemporary update of the venerable Piper Cub.

It seems that Ali, Boni, the wannabe Cub, and the photographer were all in Africa for a photo shoot to help the poor and downtrodden. Yes! I found the photographer's website, which helpfully explains:

For the Core Values campaign, both Ali and Bono wear Edun clothing. Ali carries a Louis Vuitton/Edun collaboration bag. This collaboration bag is a brown Keepall 45 in Louis Vuitton’s embossed Monogram Révélation leather. The bag is accessorized with a Monogram charm hand-crafted in Kenya by Made, a fair-trade fashion accessory company which strives to provide employment and promote ethical trade in Africa. Made regularly partners with Edun. Both the charm and the inside of the Monogram Révélation bag bear a plaque with the inscription “Every journey began in Africa.” Along with his guitar case, Bono carries a waterproof Keepall travel bag in Monogram canvas.

Kinda makes your eyes water, don't it? How could any two individuals (well, three, counting the photographer) be so big-hearted? I feel like running right out and buying a Louis Vuitton billfold, or watch fob, or whatever they make in my price range. Blue skies! -- Dan Ford

We gave you laws; why don't you respect us?

New York's Mayor Bloomberg, who is thrilled by the prospect of a mosque and Islamic cultural center next door to Ground Zero, got rich by creating a financial news network. The Bloomberg.com website published a wonderful headline and "news" story the other day:

Congress Enacting Most U.S. Laws Since '60s Gets No Respect
The 111th Congress returned to Washington this week with a record of legislative achievement that rivals President Lyndon Johnson’s “Great Society.” Voters may show their thanks by throwing lawmakers out of office.

To which one is inspired to answer: Yes! Exactly! Of course the humorous aspect is that the Bloomberg journos take it as a given that the more laws Congress passes, no matter how destructive to our liberty and our prosperity, the more Congress is to be applauded. Do you think they'll ever figure out that the poll ratings aren't despite the legislation, but because of it? Blue skies! -- Dan Ford

America as No. 2

Here's a great essay in Asia Sentinel about the seemingly inexorable rise of China as a superpower, equal to or the superior of the United States:

Two important questions for the second decade of the 21st Century are whether China can be satisfied even by becoming a coequal of the United States; and whether the latter would be amenable to accepting China as its coequal? A very important, but a tacit, aspect related to the latter question is that the United States should also be ready for the scenario of China becoming number one among the hierarchy of nations within a decade or so.

The economic superpower is almost certain to become a military superpower as well, though perhaps not following the models we are familiar with: Germany in the 1930s, the Soviet Union in the 1950s, the United States in the 1990s. China will dice and slice, building its space- and electronic-warfare capabilities as a counterweight to the U.S. military; turning the small and eventually the large nations of Asia into pliable states on the model of Finland, whose testicles were owned by the Soviet Union for the duration of the Cold War; and gradually expanding the sphere of its dominance:.

What is interesting to note is that, as China continues its awesome economic rise, it seems to have initiated the process of expanding the list of its core interests. In the past, only Taiwan and Tibet were included in that list. Lately, however, it has also added the South China Sea as a core issue. Considering the fact that the PRC has shown no inclination to negotiate on the "old" core issues, it is expected to do the same regarding the South China Sea. There is a major difference between its old and its new core issues.

On its old core interests (Taiwan and Tibet) no other country is claiming sovereignty over them (even though one can argue that Taiwan claims to be a sovereign nation and its sovereignty is recognized by numerous countries, but their numbers are steadily dwindling). However, in the case of the South China Sea, the interests of other states of East Asia come into conflict with that of China.

Blue skies! -- Dan Ford

On the clash of civilizations

Ayaan Hirsi Ali, who is my favorite former member of the Dutch parliament, had a splendid op-ed in the Wall Street Journal yesterday. She writes in part:

What do the controversies around the proposed mosque near Ground Zero, the eviction of American missionaries from Morocco earlier this year, the minaret ban in Switzerland last year, and the recent burka ban in France have in common? All four are framed in the Western media as issues of religious tolerance. But that is not their essence. Fundamentally, they are all symptoms of what the late Harvard political scientist Samuel Huntington called the "Clash of Civilizations," particularly the clash between Islam and the West.

(And Sam Huntington is my favorite late Harvard professor, not only for The Clash of Civilizations but even more for his magnificent analysis of the American experiment, Who Are We?)

Ms. Ali concludes with this bit of advice:

We need to recognize the extent to which the advance of radical Islam is the result of an active propaganda campaign. According to a CIA report written in 2003, the Saudis invested at least $2 billion a year over a 30-year period to spread their brand of fundamentalist Islam. The Western response in promoting our own civilization was negligible.

Our civilization is not indestructible: It needs to be actively defended. This was perhaps Huntington's most important insight. The first step towards winning this clash of civilizations is to understand how the other side is waging it—and to rid ourselves of the One World illusion.

Blue skies! -- Dan Ford

Let's all be happy for the city manager

I earlier celebrated Hugo Tassone, the Yonkers policeman who retired at age 44 with a pension of $101,000, having never earned more than $74,000 a year. Now we can cast a prayerful glance toward Robert Rizzo, the city manager of Bell, California (pop. 40,000) who resigned recently when it came out that he was earning $800,000 a year, along with other benefits including 26 weeks (!) of vacation and sick time that brought his annual compensation to an estimated $1,500,000. Forced out or not, Mr. Rizzo stands to collect a pension of at least $600,000 a year.

Even so, his good fortune pales beside that of Bruce Malkenhorst, who is retired from his post as city manager of Vernon, California. His pension is a relatively slender $510,000 a year, but here's the thing: Vernon's population, as of the 2000 Census, was 91. Blue skies! -- Dan Ford

The glass is two-fifths full

Peggy Noonan is always worth reading. This weekend she writes about what we might call the New Pessimism, or whatever happened to the American dream that the kids would always have it better than we did?

Parents now fear something has stopped. They think they lived through the great abundance, a time of historic growth in wealth and material enjoyment. They got it, and they enjoyed it, and their kids did, too.... But they look around, follow the political stories and debates, and deep down they think their children will live in a more limited country, that jobs won't be made at a great enough pace, that taxes—too many people in the cart, not enough pulling it—will dishearten them, that the effects of 30 years of a low, sad culture will leave the whole country messed up....

Optimists think that if we manage to turn a few things around, their kids may have it . . . almost as good. The country they inherit may be . . . almost as good. And it's kind of a shock to think like this; pessimism isn't in our DNA. But it isn't pessimism, really, it's a kind of tough knowingness, combined, in most cases, with a daily, personal commitment to keep plugging.

But do our political leaders have any sense of what people are feeling deep down? They don't act as if they do.

Sure, part of this is just growing old: the world doesn't look as bright at sixty as it did at thirty. (Ms. Noonan was a speechwriter for Ronald Reagan.) But every once in a while I look at my red Irish passport and I think: I'm glad I've got that. Just in case!  And I'm glad that my granddaughters carry red passports (British, in their case) as well as the green ones. Americans didn't used to think that way. Blue skies! -- Dan Ford

The Mosque at Ground Zero

Dorothy Rabinowitz, who ostensibly is a TV reviewer for the Wall Street Journal, is also one of the most brilliant writers on the follies of contemporary life. Yesterday she weighed in on The Mosque at Ground Zero.

Nine years after the Twin Towers fell into the street, and took three thousand people with them, we still don't have a replacement to fill that great hole in the ground. The political-legal process just can't handle it. (During the Great Depression, the Empire State Building went from ground breaking to first visitor in eleven months.) So it looks like the first new building to rise in the area, and to look down into that hole, will be--a thirteen-story mosque!

Read Ms. Rabinowitz's take on this. No summary of mine can do it justice. Blue skies! -- Dan Ford