Wednesday, April 30, 2008

The Miley Cyrus Crisis

I would make some superior comments about the stench of hypocrisy, but it doesn't even rise to that level. This is just froth. Miley Cyrus, aka Hannah Montana, has showed that at 15, she has the beginnings of a woman's body and this has shocked the world. A large number of people think she should apologize for the photos Annie Leibovitz took for Vanity Fair.

Miley and her family are retroactively upset. Disney is wildly upset. Parents are furious. Bill O'Reilly is incensed.

And from all of this ...

Vanity Fair will sell more magazines. Annie Leibovitz will get higher fees. Disney will not cancel the show and will continue to reap huge profits. Parents will say nothing to their daughters, or they'd need to explain why showing less skin than is evident on any day at the beach is cause for alarm. The daughters will remain fans because either (a) they don't understand, or (b) they do. An increased number of teenage boys will become fans. Bill O'Reilly will return his attention to Rev. Wright.

And if this turns out to be the wildest moment that a girl who has been earning millions of dollars in the entertainment industry indulges in before she turns 16, then Billy Ray deserves Father of the Year. Nobody needs to apologize to Annie, who has seen all this before.

Monday, April 28, 2008

Stimulus? More like gasoline compensation

The United States consumes about 150 billion gallons of gasoline per year. Prices are higher by about $1 in the last year. That means that the entire benefit of the federal "stimulus" payments to American taxpayers will be enough to offset the increase in gas costs.

If the increase went to American producers, then it would at least recycle to some degree, but all the increase is due to the rise in oil prices. More than half of that now goes to foreigners.

What little stays home is going to large oil companies. Do you think that transferring billions of dollars of federal government money to them will offset the catastrophe in housing? I doubt it.

Sunday, April 20, 2008

Education spending priorities

The SMART program in Oregon, which uses volunteers to assist students with reading, is being cut. The paid coordinators, numbering about 200, are getting axed in order to save about a million dollars. This despite the fact that taking part in SMART boosts a child's chance of passing the state reading standards by about 60%.

Put this in perspective. Statewide, public spending on K-12 education runs about $4 billion a year. Some 200 coordinators, costing $8 to $11/hour, make SMART happen, along with other private sector contributions. Why are the schools letting this happen?

First, I suppose, because the coordinators would be unionized and with benefits, vacations, etc. would cost twice as much as now. More importantly, volunteers are never embraced by the public schools because they constitute such a danger to the chief argument for high teacher pay. Which is that public teachers are highly educated in their specialties and are consequently much better at teaching.

I'm not questioning that some academic specialties, such as teaching calculus and physics in high school, can't be replaced by ordinary volunteers. Nor do I doubt that there are dedicated and effective teachers who are worth everything they're paid and more. I do doubt that the ownership of a masters degree in education has much to do with it, or even more than a tiny amount of "teach ed" classes for undergrads.

An intelligently organized system of education will use all the assets available to the maximum possible, in order to get the best results for the money. There may be times when you need specialists. On the other hand, without much apparent effect, we taxpayers employ specialists in bi-lingual education to attempt to bring Hispanic children up to fluency in English.

The low-cost alternative is to locate the Hispanic children at age five and figuratively plunk them down in sandboxes with a greater number of English-speaking five-year-olds for a few months. Not only are five-year-olds more effective at this than highly educated adults, they will do it for free. All we need to do is build the sandboxes and employ some adult to keep little Johnny from hitting Maria with his shovel.

The great myth is that the optimum strategy is to employ the most skilled possible people to perform every function, even if you then cannot do enough. This was the issue when I ran for the Lane Community College Board (three times, unsuccessfully). It has not been resolved there either.

Saturday, April 19, 2008

The China/Zimbabwe crisis

Some people are taking the isssue of Chinese ship carrying arms to Zimbabwe as posing a problem for China. I doubt it. It should pose an ethical problem for the United States, but I also doubt that it will be recognized as such.

The idea is supposed to be that the Chinese will be discomfited by the prospect of supplying arms to Mugabe after his regime has effectively been voted out of power. This ignores the simple fact that China has never had a problem dealing with Mugabe because there is nothing that Mugabe does to Zimbabweans that the Chinese government doesn't do to its own citizens. In spades. There isn't really even a pretense of democracy in China, so why should they be upset that Mugabe indulges in the pretense and then abrogates it.

This should be a problem for the United States. China is a world power today because we have decided to buy everything they can manufacture, which is most everything we consume. They have no political ethics that we would recognize. Thugs like Mugabe will stay in power because of our obsession with having our consumers goods at the least apparent cost. The situation would be a wakeup call. I'm not holding my breath.

Wednesday, April 16, 2008

Suffering under Rhodesian colonialism

An AP story describes Mugabe's initial reputation for reconciliation, mentioning that he had offered concessions to whites in 1980. It also states that black africans had suffered under white rule for decades before that.

What exactly does that mean? Prior to white colonists, the population was 710,000. It then grew above 10 million. Life expectancy rose. Literacy, previously zero, became fairly high. Intertribal wars vanished.

Without any question, the whites did not see any likelihood that they could or should turn over the management or ownership of the large farms they had created, and which had produced the excess food that made the population growth possible, to blacks. The general opinion of the outside world at the time of Mugabe's guerrila war was that the whites were just narrow bigots.

Black majority rule has been in place for almost 30 years. Life expectancy is plummeting, and certainly not just due to AIDS. Education is declining. Unemployment is 80%. Inflation is in six figures. Exercising your democratic rights can cost you your life. The seized white farms, formerly productive, are now running at subsistence level or less.

Exactly what did Ian Smith get wrong?

Sunday, April 13, 2008

Iraq isn't Germany

Once again, I read in the newspaper this morning that there are parallels between Germany in 1945 and Iraq now. Would that this were so. But isn't.

Starting at the top, George W. Bush isn't a reincarnation of FDR and Bremner was not Marshall. This was managed badly. But it must be remembered that the project was sold to the American people on two premises. First, that Saddam had WMD of which he must be deprived. Second, that the process would be brief and relatively inexpensive.

It would simply have been impossible to go into Iraq with the public knowing that they were looking at a trillion dollar cost stretching over a decade. It was a few tens of millions and we would be out of there in a matter of months. After WW II, we knew what we had to do in Germany, which was to make sure that we didn't do it again. The Germans were thoroughly beaten and knew it. They and everyone else accepted that they had started the war and however the Allies dealt with them, they had no moral cause for complaint.

The Iraqis could be, and generally were, grateful for the overthrow of Saddam, but they then wanted to run their own affairs. By our standards, they would have done so badly, but if ensuring that people have functioning democracies is an imperative, why haven't we invaded Burma or Zimbabwe?

When we leave Iraq, which can't be a moment too soon, we will leave a mess. Whenever we leave, and it's not likely to get any better. The world is full of messes. True, we exacerbated this one, but it's time to cut our losses.

The Zimbabwe Civil War

The odds are increasing that Zimbabwe will descend into civil war as Mugabe has figured out that his neighbors won't do anything about him. He'll play the anti-colonial card to the end. That will continue to work with his core supporters, who don't understand economic reality at all, but the millions who will starve may develop a working hypothesis that Mugabe is the root cause.

At some point, a large number of blacks will form a working partnership with the white farmers. We will then see whether the Western democracies, which were so keen on booting out Ian Smith and "liberating" the country thirty years ago, will have the stomach to stay with him this time. I'm guessing they won't.

Monday, April 07, 2008

Whither Zimbabwe

A hundred years ago, the population of what is now Zimbabwe was perhaps 6% of what it is now. It was possible to feed and house the former population with the attitudes toward social and economic organization that then prevailed. However, the current population is unsustainable without white farmers.

Life expectancy has fallen by about a quarter century since Robert Mugabe "liberated" his countrymen from the oppression of white people. Nevertheless, total population continues to rise. There is simply no way to sustain the population without persuading some of the diaspora to return, but instead, the regime is intent on driving away the few who remain.

Death, as someone once said, is nature's way of telling you to slow down. It's also nature's way of balancing resources and requirements in a population. I doubt that Mugabe's new cleansed Zimbabwe will be able to feed more than three or four million, and with food suddenly no longer in surplus worldwide, it would take an act of serious altruism for donor nations to make up the difference.

The future of Zimbabwe is death on an unprecedented scale. There's little to be done to prevent it. The politics of race in Africa is such that those who have some influence, such as the rulers of South Africa, will not act because to do would be to admit that Robert Mugabe did not produce an improvement in the lives of black Africans and that maybe Ian Smith was not evil.

Instead, they will prevaricate while many, eventually millions of, Zimbabweans die. I wish I could feel more empathy, but when a people collectively commit suicide with their eyes wide open, I figure it's their choice. Not a wise choice, but not one that we are required to overturn.