I haven’t been following Oregon politics very closely since we left in 2006. I was surprised to see that John Kitzhaber is running for governor again. He got a lot of great things accomplished the last time he was governor (1995-2003). He didn’t do a great job of getting himself a lot of good publicity for what he accomplished. I hope he has better luck this time.

Tim Wise posted this article on his web site, Bikini Liberalism: Juan Williams, Implicit Bias and the Trouble With NPR.

I’ve never been a fan of Juan Williams. Far too chummy with his FOX News colleagues and too eager to attack longstanding civil rights leaders in the name of supposedly courageous political “independence,” Williams is one I have never thought to defend before.

But today such a defense is deserved. Williams, it turns out, has been done a supreme disservice by his other employer, National Public Radio, and it is a disservice to which the harshest condemnation should be applied.

Sometimes Tim Wise and I see eye to eye and sometimes we don’t. In this case, I agree with what he said and the way he said it.  I am not a fan of Juan Williams, but in this case NPR may have done to Juan Williams what was done to Shirley Sherrod.

Whether pro or con Williams firing, I must admit I have not seen the whole interview.  I could be wrong no matter which position I take.

The Myth of Charter Schools by Diane Ravitch in The New York Review of Books is a review of the movie Waiting for “Superman”,

Had I not read this review before seeing the movie (which I have not seen yet), I might have fallen for the premise of the movie.  (Perhaps I might have guessed at some of the information in this review.)

Just a few selected examples from the review follow:

Some fact-checking is in order, and the place to start is with the film’s quiet acknowledgment that only one in five charter schools is able to get the “amazing results” that it celebrates.

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Perhaps the greatest distortion in this film is its misrepresentation of data about student academic performance. The film claims that 70 percent of eighth-grade students cannot read at grade level. This is flatly wrong.

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Another highly praised school that is featured in the film is the SEED charter boarding school in Washington, D.C. SEED seems to deserve all the praise that it receives from Guggenheim, CBS’s 60 Minutes, and elsewhere. It has remarkable rates of graduation and college acceptance. But SEED spends $35,000 per student, as compared to average current spending for public schools of about one third that amount.

Read the rest of the article to understand some of the other “tricks” SEED uses to get the results that it does.

If we want public schools to achieve the success that some charter schools achieve, then we must know the entire suite of techniques that the Charter Schools use.  If we pick a few techniques that fit our preconceived notions of the cheapest way to achieve good results, we will be astonished to find that public schools cannot make the same achievements.

The article Britain Details Radical Cuts in Spending, Citing Debt in The New York Times may give a hint at what is going to be happening in countries around the world. It may even come to a country near you after the November elections.

Britain’s Chancellor of the Exchequer unveiled the country’s steepest public spending cuts in decades on Wednesday, sharply reducing welfare benefits and eliminating almost half a million public sector jobs over the next four years as the country seeks to free itself of crushing debt from the global financial crisis.
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The cuts, far more detailed and sweeping than those in many other Western nations, were depicted by the opposition as a reckless gamble that could tip the country back into recession. Ed Miliband, the leader of the Labour opposition, called the five-year austerity plan the “biggest gamble in decades.”

As more and more countries adopt policies like this, then we will finally see who is right and who is wrong about Keynesian economics.  No longer will we have to argue about this subject.

The last time this was tried on a massive scale was in 1937.  The results of that test were only overcome after a World War.  Can civilization survive again after a cure like that?

How are you preparing for the impending test?

The New York Times has the article  Income Inequality: Too Big to Ignore by Robert H. Frank, an economics professor at the Johnson Graduate School of Management at Cornell University. Read the article to see how he justifies the following conclusion:

In short, the economist’s cost-benefit approach — itself long an important arrow in the moral philosopher’s quiver — has much to say about the effects of rising inequality. We need not reach agreement on all philosophical principles of fairness to recognize that it has imposed considerable harm across the income scale without generating significant offsetting benefits.

I was just thinking about Bill Gates reported $40 billion fortune. If he just sat back and got a 5% return on this fortune, he would earn $2 billion every year.  Can you imagine the problem of figuring out how to spend $2 billion on your small family?  It’s a good thing he doesn’t get it in cash.  He’d need help just cleaning it up to make room for him to fit in his house.

The Reuters article has it correctly with the necessary qualifier, Swiss Complete World’s Longest Rail Tunnel.

They fail to mention the 4 other tunnels that are quite a bit longer than the Swiss tunnel.

If you believe Wikipedia, see their article, List of longest tunnels in the world. The longest one is 85 miles compared to the puny Swiss tunnel of only 35.5 miles.

Of course, if you go by volume, perhaps the Swiss tunnel does have some bragging rights.  I don’t know the numbers for this measure.

The Reuters article, U.S. Backs Off In Currency Dispute With China, gives the details.

The decision to delay the Treasury report appears to have been taken at the last minute. Industry sources had been primed to expect it by 1 p.m. EDT (1700 GMT) on Friday.

It was apparently right down to the wire, but finally someone came to their senses.  My supposition is that someone finally backed off from this politically popular measure that would have spelled disaster for the world economy.

To hear Klaus Schwab tell it in my previous post Interview of Klaus Schwab, Chairman, World Economic Forum, China is trying to boost internal consumption so that they won’t be so dependent on exports.  This will make it less disruptive to their own economy to let the value of their currency rise.  They have already let it rise at the rate of 1% per month over the last three months.

So it seems that China is carrying out the policy that we wish, and they are preparing to position themselves to carry it out even faster.  Would it be smart for the United States to pick a fight with its largest creditor because we want them to do something on our timetable instead of their own?  Would they be smart to disrupt their country by raising the value of their currency too fast just to please their largest borrower?

Whatever trouble we are in, we brought it on ourselves.

Perhaps 5,000 years of experience does allow the Chinese to act as the mature player in this comedy of errors.  With only a couple hundred years of history, we naturally take the part of the immature buffoon.

Charlie Rose had a fascinating Interview of Klaus Schwab, Chairman, World Economic Forum.  The World Economic Forum is the organization that puts on the annual meeting of world leaders at Davos, Switzerland.

Among all the other interesting topics discussed, Charlie Rose got Klaus Schwab to discuss his understanding of leadership.  He defined leadership qualities as brains, heart, soul, and good nerves.

In discussing why there are fewer and fewer great leaders he said that the main deficiency was in the soul.  He went on to explain that it was understandable in the current environment because “instead of following your compass you have to find out what is the public opinion – more soul, vision, values part is sacrificed to the short term interest of gaining …”.  I couldn’t quite catch the last word.

At this point, I thought that after such a great interview and the showing of such great insight, that Klaus Schwab had somehow missed an important point.

The last sentence of the interview made me say “Hallelujah, he really does get it.”