Now that's a stretch

Far be it from me to criticize other countries, or their leaders, especially in a place where I know very little, but this one isn't getting through my five-hole.

 

Supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei is making statements covered in the Washington Post threatening consequences to U.S. interests around the world, if the U.S. attacks Iran:

"The Iranian nation and its officials are peace-seekers and the Islamic republic would not invade anybody," the television quoted Khamenei as saying.

I'm sorry.  Did he just say, "the Iranian nation and its officials are peace-seekers"?

 

The same man whose country funds Hezbollah?  The country whose President said, " As the Imam said, Israel must be wiped off the map."? 

 

Yeah.  Peaceful.  Mmm hmm.

Weeping at what we Sow

President Bush, recognizing limited public support for his positions, is taking a new political approach: go after the low hanging fruit.

 

Stories in the Star Tribune has a story about the President seeking to calm American fears about rising gas prices.  The Washington Post describes the President's efforts to alleviate American's at-the-pump costs this way:

President Bush, faced with rising public discontent over high fuel prices, today directed his administration to help investigate possible price gouging and ordered a temporary halt to deposits in the Strategic Petroleum Reserve.

According to the Star Tribune:

Bush is under pressure to do something about gas prices that have reached nearly $3 a gallon. In a new CNN poll, 69 percent of respondents said gasoline price increases had caused them personal hardship. Other polls suggest that voters favor Democrats over Republicans on the issue, and President Bush gets low marks for handling gas prices.

Ladies and Gentlemen, welcome to reality.  Americans are becoming aware of the costs (literally) of excess dependence on a commodity with a limited supply.  For some reason the political talking heads, and the media pundits find American's response to rising gas prices completely normal and dare-I-say, logical.

 

I realize that each of us, and every country by extension, is a walking contradiction.  Apparently I'm sufficiently naive to be surprised at the depths, however.  Consider it this way:

America is the capitalist, driving force of the world economy.  It's the leader of the Free World.  We are the "Land of the Free, and Home of the Brave" as a bumper sticker explained to me yesterday.

 

But really, all we want is the safety and security of government intervention in markets; the stability of price-caps; and surety of whatever an American version of the Iron Rice Bowl would be.   Because otherwise, how could we possibly be A. surprised, or B. Alarmed, that oil prices are going through the roof.  It's not like it wasn't expected.  We've always known that Oil isn't renewable.  And we've known since at least the 1950s that supply would start to decrease at some point.  The only thing that might have caught us slightly off-guard is the present-day situation of surging demand driven by developing economies adaptation of our own petroleum reliant methods of economic development. (China and India creating automobile economies.)

 

Do I think there is price gauging and collusion going on?  Most likely.  Otherwise, wholesale prices (price per barrel) wouldn't hit $70 in the same quarter as industry posts unbelievably large profits ($10 billion).  But I don't think the gauging or collusion matter.  Because the market is willing to bear the costs.  There is grumbling, but not outrage. There is complaining, not campaigning. 

 

Americans are convinced (against evidence, empirical proof, and realistic considerations of the world) that bigger is better, and by-golly, we're going to pay for it.  So thank you, Mr. President, for taking our concerns so deeply to heart, but really, we're fine.  And prices will keep going up.

 

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1 Billion Miles/Gallon

 

In other news, we've found a way to get 1 billion miles to a gallon.  Now all we need to do is miniaturize black holes (about 10,000 light years across) to get them to fit under the hood.  Engineers: you've now got a mission.  Let's get cracking!

The Senate, by Blogspot

I'm not sure, but I think Blogspot just got the contract for the Senate homepage.  Don't believe me?  Check it out.

Missing the boat

"Fresh off the boat."  A not-so-nice way to describe newly arrived immigrants who just haven't caught on to "being American" yet.

 

Well, the expression of current U.S. policies towards China--as depicted in this Washington Post article--make it sound like Americans are the ones fresh off the boat.

 

After spending the first 2 decades after World War Two creating an interlocking system of international political and financial institutions, and the three decades after that supporting and nurturing them, the past half-decade has seen what looks like a concerted U.S. effort to dismantle the system that has given us our wealth, power, success and prestige.

 

People say it took Nixon to open China.  It might be one of the great ironies of history that the second coming of his advisors is what it has taken to close China off from the U.S. again.

 

For those of you unwilling or too busy to read the Post article, you're probably wondering what I'm talking about.  Here's a quick example:

"China, [the administration says], must let its currency rise in value to reduce the unfair advantage its exporters enjoy against U.S. manufacturers. China must further crack down on the piracy of American films, music and other products. And China must open its market wider to help shrink the U.S.-China trade imbalance, which soared to $202 billion last year -- accounting for more than one-quarter of the U.S. trade deficit."

Not to beat the ghost of a dead horse, but: China is a nation of 1.3 billion people.  It has a 5,000 year history.  They invented paper, gunpowder, fireworks, and public works programs.  They created the modern bureaucracy--about 4,000 years ago.  Basically, what I'm saying is that they are a proud people capable of monumental feats, and engaging in a politics sophisticated enough to endure far longer than the Holy Roman Empire, for example. 

 

For the administration in any country--much less a country with deteriorating ties to an up-and-coming regional and world power--to demand what are in essence, concessions, can have no effect but the automatic rejection of the proposals.  Even though President Hu has already pledged to crack down on intellectual property rights abuses in China.

 

Where I'm from, if you want someone to do something you want, it can't be an order--it has to be a request and it should be done politely.  Maybe other parts of the U.S. work differently.  And maybe parts of China allow that type of behavior.  But I haven't seen them, and I haven't heard about them.

 

Maybe it's really the Americans who are "fresh off the boat" in this case.

China Woes

In continuing bad news for the sick in China, there is news today of an explosion in Shanxi province (not to be confused with Shaanxi) that rocked building for over a kilometer, and broke windows as far as 2 km away.  As near as I can tell from multimaps.com, Yuanping is about 200 km west of Shijiazhuang. And if you haven't heard of that provincial capital before, it's because the province is the epitome of provincial.  Probably also why the hospital was in a state to operate more like a bomb than a building.

 

I don't know what China is doing in it's hospitals, but it seems to me that an explosion of that magnitude is not likely to come from an exploding tank of anesthetic gas.

 

This follow's on the fire last fall in a hospital in Jilin province that, supposedly, led to an emphasis on hospital safety issues.

The rising cost of "it's someone elses problem"

The Washington Post included this graphic on the rising cost of education in the online edition. I'd go to the living room to see if it was in the print edition too, but does anyone read the print edition for anything but sales and coupons anymore?

While not trying to be crass, does it really come as a shock to anyone that the costs of public education are going up? The requirements and expectations we have put on our schools over the past 20 years (and possibly longer, but, education not being my baliwick, I can't really say) have grown while our criticisms of it have also grown.

Teacher pay is usually a primary scape-goat, but what about special education, the number of kids that are 'special needs' because their parents aren't willing or capable of doing the job of raising their children? What about the "great melting pot" effect? It's one of America's great strengths, but it also costs us a lot: we accept immigrants from all corners of the world. Immigrants whose children don't speak English--yet. So they have to learn English at school. Not necessarily a big deal 50 years ago when our ethnic enclaves were fairly uniform: northern Europeans in Minnesota; Hispanics in the Southwest; Asians tended to stay on the coasts. Well, welcome to globalization. Everyone is everywhere, and so the challenge of teaching kids english (so they can get good jobs, pay taxes, and be upstanding Americans--rather than go to jail) goes up as well.

OH, and I forgot one of the largest pieces. We've begun to recognize that forced memorization is not necessarily the best teaching method. Many children (and adults) learn much more by actually doing something that simply reading about it or listening as it is described. It costs more to give children the opportunity to learn by doing (but actually learn) rather than just go through the motions of learning as so many countries' education systems encourage.

I've written about it before, and undoubtedly will again, but education is one of this country's greatest stregnths. We do it better than other countries precisely because we teach everyone. Precisely because we ensure that we teach to the kids who need to see, hear, or do to learn; not just the kids who have a natural gift for picking up lessons from books and multiplication tables. If we as a society decide that it costs too much to educate our children in a way that not only prepares them to operate in the world we have created for them, but also educates them in such a way that prepares them to thrive in it, then we will have failed as a civilization--and we'll all have to spend a lot more time studying Hindi and Mandarin.

Welcome to the Jungle

Welcome to the Jungle. 

Not Axel Rose's jungle, but Thomas Hobbes', or Upton Sinclair's.

 

Apparently the declining college admission rate--the fact that there are so many students applying to college today that even students with rather good High School performances aren't getting in--has gotten so bad that the Washington Post is breaking from their political coverage to inform us of our imperiled future.

 

Too bad for Sinclair's protagonists, but Hobbes' description of life as competition is clearly getting worse as Thomas Friedman's description of our Flat World becomes more apparent to those of us living it.

 

Part of me wonders how the ever-increasing drive for people to go to college is coupled with the fact that wages in all non-college (and really, non-graduate educated) positions are going down.  I wonder how this is coupled with unions driving wages up, and influxes of immigrants (from countries that are economically far worse off), are playing into making the erosion of a working-middle class evaporate. 

 

Any thoughts?

 

The Two Americas

I was talking about the "Two Americas" last night with a co-worker from Spain.  I was describing how it can mean a lot of things to a lot of people: the divide between rich and poor; educated or not; white-collar or blue collar; city vs. rural; coast vs. "heartland".  He said he's seen some of that--between attending a U.S. high school in a rural part of a state bifurcated by the agriculture/industry divide, and then living and working in D.C.  He said they are just two very different places.  I'm fairly sure most of us would agree with that.

 

Today the news is that our Number 1 and Number 2 constitutional officers within the executive branch authorized the use of classified information for political gain--and possibly to mislead the country into a war.  These allegations could be true or false, but our reaction to them as a country will be telling, as far as which of the two Americas really shows up.

 

Are we the America that holds the law above all men, and where personal ambition is not to be put above national interest.  In short--a nation where even the President has to follow the law, and suffer consequences for not doing so.

 

Or are we an America where the President can do whatever he wants with his office, so long as I would prefer to grab a beer with him rather than the other guy running?

 

Yet another version, are we going to react as though President Bush is a Dubai company specializing in sea-commerce trying to buy U.S. based assets from a company owned by a different foreign country?

 

Or are we going to react as though President Bush is a commander in chief using faulty intelligence and cherry-picking hand-crafted analyses to support a faulty position and immerse America in a war he has recently stated will ultimately be"someone else's problem"? (It's all the way at the bottom.)