May 2008 archive

No News Merry-Go-Round Here

Monday’s Headlines: Voter ID Battle Shifts to Proof of Citizenship: Pollution levels have dropped in U.S. coastal waters: First US aid flight reaches Burma: Earthquake strikes Western China: ‘Ghost city’ Mosul braces for assault on last bastion of al-Qa’ida in Iraq: Lebanese Army caught in crossfire between Druze and Hezbollah gunmen: Beatings and torture intensify as Zimbabwe prepares to vote again: Tadic claims victory for pro-Europeans in Serbian elections: Polish Holocaust hero dies at 98: Venezuelan president criticizes German chancellor  

News Organizations Are Reporting Between 3,000 and 5,000 Dead in One County

‘Hundreds buried’ by China quake

Almost 900 students are buried after an earthquake measuring 7.8 caused a building to collapse in south-western China, state media reports.

President Hu Jintao urged “all-out” efforts to rescue victims of the quake, which hit 92km (57 miles) from Chengdu, Sichuan’s provincial capital.

Premier Wen Jiabao is travelling to the area and troops are being sent to help with disaster relief efforts.

Officials have confirmed 107 deaths in the area but the figure could rise.

Cries for help

There are harrowing reports from the scene of the collapse in Dujiangyan city – about 100km (60 miles) from the epicentre in Wenchuan county.

U.S. spying is up, but not prosecutions

As more Americans are watched, fewer cases are made. The trend concerns civil liberties groups as well as some lawmakers and legal experts.

WASHINGTON — The number of Americans being secretly wiretapped or having their financial and other records reviewed by the government has continued to increase as officials aggressively use powers approved after the Sept. 11 attacks. But the number of terrorism prosecutions ending up in court — one measure of the effectiveness of such sleuthing — has continued to decline, in some cases precipitously.

The trends, visible in new government data and a private analysis of Justice Department records, are worrisome to civil liberties groups and some legal scholars. They say it is further evidence that the government has compromised the privacy rights of ordinary citizens without much to show for it.

The emphasis on spy programs also is starting to give pause to some members of Congress who fear the government is investing too much in anti-terrorism programs at the expense of traditional crime-fighting. Other lawmakers are raising questions about how well the FBI is performing its counter-terrorism mission.

Support disaster relief in Myanmar (Burma) Through the UN

By zwoof at 2008-05-11

A cartoon is worth a thousand pictures

Glenn Greenwald has finished reading all 8000 pages the Pentagon has released in the Pentagon Propaganda/”Military Analysts” Scandal.  For the past few days he has been reporting on their content and it is just damning!

For a reminder of just what we’re talking about-

Brian Williams’ "response" to the military analyst story

Glenn Greenwald, Salon

Wednesday April 30, 2008 07:00 EDT

New analysis from Greenwald below.

If Senator John McCain were the DEMOCRATIC nominee for President, the Republican Party, in the guise of Rush and Sean and Anne and Michelle, would destroy him as follows:

Sorry that i cant embed this video

(click it…watch it….you know you want to)

Simon and Garfunkel II

Mrs. Robinson

A new economics study by Joseph Altonji, Prashant Bharadwaj, and Fabian Lange demonstrates that:

The earnings premium for skilled labour has increased dramatically in recent decades. Yet, as this column shows, Americans are not acquiring significantly greater skills in response to this change. The resulting gap will increase US income inequality in the coming decades.

The study goes on to demonstrate that despite the increased premium value of developing labor skills through higher education, the population in general has not sought these skills in relative proportion.  In other words, we aren’t seeing many gains in people improving their financial prospects by investing in their own education.

Economist Brad DeLong says that the study’s authors don’t know why this is happening (which is a fair complaint), but goes on to suggest that

This raises the possibility that the only easy way to reduce market inequality is to greatly increase the supply of the skilled and educated in the long run by making higher education free

This seems unlikely to be effective to me on two levels.  First of all, an economist ought to understand (and DeLong does) that there is no such thing as “free”; someone will have to pay for higher education to be free to its consumers.  Indeed, as he points out, “which is a very dubious policy on the inequality front, because it starts with a honking huge transfer from the average taxpayer today to the relatively rich well-educated of tomorrow.”

But the more important rebuttal to his point (more effective than his own) is that brought up by Tyler Cowen: that the skills required to succeed at even a low level in college are poorly taught to the population at large.

One of my close friends is completing her first year as a public school teacher in New York City (her third year as a professional teacher).  Her class is a fourth grade class at a public school in Grand Concourse in the Bronx.  She has 28 students, only one of which reads at a fourth grade level.  For a wide variety of reasons, despite her significant efforts, it is unlikely that more than a couple of her students will be at a fifth grade level when the school year ends this month.  And no, this is not the most remedial class of fourth graders her school has.

It seems to me that DeLong obscures the real problem, that of students being unprepared and unlikely to succeed in higher education, with that of students being unable to afford higher education.  Many, if not most, college and graduate students debt finance their education; a rational choice considering the economic benefits that education will offer them.  However, rational actors will not pay for a premium education if they consider themselves unlikely to succeed at it and therefore unlikely to reap the future economic benefit.

I read this study as evidence of the continued failure of our primary and secondary education systems, not as a study of the failure of our society to make higher education affordable or making the information about the benefits of higher education widely available.  What say you?

Grampy is still the king.  His eyes light up when he sees me.  We have some time to kill before we can check into the campground so we head for the boardwalk.  I watch him savor the beauty of sand dunes and beach grass ten feet below us.  We arrive at the peak of the last dune and look out at the Atlantic Ocean.  I say “Do you like the beach?”  He melts my heart by looking at me with those wide innocent eyes and says it, beach, for the first time in his life.