Donations for sports up, donations for academia flat

That's what the Chronicle of Higher Education says about donations to colleges with the largest athletic departments. Twenty-seven of these programs raised over $20,000,000. Oklahoma State probably takes it to an extreme: it has bought life insurance policies on over twenty of its older friends, each policy will pay the university $10,000,000 when the friend dies.

Moyers on 7 Soldiers

9 hours, 12 hours, 86 hours?

There are at least three different answers to the question as to how long it took to comply with FISA when insurgents had captured three of our men. Michael McConnell, the Director of National Intelligence, says 12 hours. The Washington Post says 9 1/2. But, the efforts to seek a warrant needed to comply with the law did not begin until 86 hours after the soldiers were reported captured. Further, much of the delay was caused by a dispute between the Justice Department and intelligence officers. Heck, it took two hours to locate Gonzales to get his okay.

Was McConnell distorting the facts to score points in his campaign to overturn FISA? He did this when he claimed in a Senate hearing that new intelligence legislation helped the recent capture of the suspected German terrorists; subsequently, he retracted his testimony. Will he retract his latest testimony?

Just words?

"If no preventive measures are taken, the project could lead to catastrophe", so says Xinhua, China's official news agency, with regard to the Three Gorges Dam, which was in the news earlier this month. There are also reports that Wen Jiabao, the premier, is concerned about the ecological problems created by the dam.

Is China about to move on their pollution problems? The cabinet has approved a five-year plan to tackle the problem. Will the plan be implemented?

A Civil War

That's the message I take from this article by Gian Gentile, who was a commander there in 2006. Even then there was a civil war raging.

Spiraling downward to a breakdown?

That's Peter Singer's opinion of our reliance on private security contractors in Iraq. Here are the basic points he makes about the use of private security contractors:

Allows policymakers to dodge key decisions
Enables a 'bigger is better' approach to operations that run contrary to our best military strategy
Inflames public opinion against the U.S.
Their actions have undermined our efforts at winning hearts and minds.

But it isn't only military contractors. We have outsourced our logistics and other vital functions in Iraq. This war will become an example of how not to fight a war.

1988 all over again?

Maybe the military of Burma learned something in 1988. This time they waited perhaps until they could identify the ringleaders of the protest against the government. They entered the monasteries at night and who knows what they did to the monks besides arresting a number of them. Reporting is very difficult. The media is controlled by the government, which seems to be unconcerned about any sanctions that might be imposed.

They are having an effect, as a lot fewer monks marched today.

Help Wanted

Shinseki said it a couple of years ago - in today's world we need more troops. Casey, the current Army chief of staff, says the same thing. The commander of Walter Reed says the hospital is still not performing the way it should because guess what - it needs more people. We pay about as many private contractors as we do soldiers in Iraq, but the contractors' interests are not our interests. Most people who signed up for the National Guard have found themselves really an intrinsic and necessary part of the regular Army.

Is a volunteer army the best choice for us today?

Mr. Galloway Speaks

It's not George Galloway, an English MP. It's Joseph Galloway, a columnist for the McClatchy newspapers. When I started reading this column, I thought it would be just another of many. But, as I read, I realized that Galloway was saying most of the same things I've said or believed. You've got to get half-way into the article before you realize that this, in today's world, is clearly a different article.

Raising the ante

The government of Burma stepped up their response to the marching monks. They fired tear gas, they clubbed people, they arrested hundreds of monks, they killed a few people. Today's crowd was smaller but still numbered in the thousands.

Oh, foreign reporters can no longer enter the country.

It's taken a year

but the Interior Department's Inspector General has finally issued his report on the failure of the Minerals Management Services to collect money due us. By and large the report supports the four auditors who revealed the chicanery at the agency. The auditors have brought lawsuit against the oil companies who cheated us. A jury has decided in favor of the auditors in the first case heard. For more on the report click here.

Had enough?

It looks like the Burmese government is reaching a boiling point. They've imposed a curfew for 60 days, prohibited gatherings of five or more, warned people not to get involved, deployed some troops. But still the monks march.

Watching our own store

There have been a number of articles about the risks involved with the Russian stockpile of nuclear weapons. But, last week revealed that we run our own risks. I'm referring, of course, to the flight of six nuclear warheads from North Dakota to Louisiana. Each of these warheads was ten times as powerful as the bomb dropped on Hiroshima.

Many nuclear specialists feel that our handling of nuclear weapons has deteriorated as the Cold War has wound down and as our Middle East wars have heated up. Is this also another problem stemming from our deployment of so much of our professional army to the Middle East wars?

Something is happening in Burma

I can't say that I know much about Burma, but every day that I look at BBC News there is another article about monks marching in protest of the government. Now, citizens are joining in. The marchers now number close to 20,000.

A love of iguanas

Jereme James so loved the Fiji Island Banded Iguana that he imported three of them. It so happens that he imported them inside his artificial leg. You see this iguana is on the endangered species list. I'm not sure of the depth of his love for the iguanas as he had four of them at home and claimed to have sold three for $32,000 a couple of years ago.

Our 21st century military

Mark Thoma at Economist's View has some trenchant comments on the current professional army and its accompanying hordes of contractors.

The idea is that privatization will lead to efficiency gains. However, without effective oversight and competition, factors generally in short supply in war zones, it's not clear that the private contractors are less wasteful than the military. I think we've all heard the stories about problems with the work some contractors have done, charges of cronyism, and the like. In addition, the difference in salary between, say, a soldier trained to recalibrate a complicated piece of machinery and a private contractor doing the same job can be large. The private contractor must be paid a substantial risk premium to work in a war zone - think of some of the salary offers for work in Iraq - while a soldier does not. This also undercuts any saving from privatization (though it may say something about how well soldiers are compensated for the jobs we ask them to do). In some cases, as described above, cheap foreign labor has avoided this problem, but that is not always possible.

I am not opposed to the government purchasing goods and services from the private sector when there are clear advantages to doing so and when the tasks are sufficiently distant from combat. It's kind of dumb, for example, for the government to make its own pens, pencils, and paper instead of buying them from private sector firms. But war zones are areas where, by their very nature, the standard rules break down. We can't expect the ordinary laws of economics to apply in a war zone and discipline firms as though they were small wheat farmers operating in purely competitive textbook markets. Who do you turn to for redress if the materials you used to build something turn out to be inferior? Who will enforce contract law if a private firm underpays local labor it hires as part of its support function for the military? Who will make sure these firms don't take advantage of the locals or, perhaps, vice-versa? Even when locals aren't involved in any way, conditions surrounding the war make it so that there's little chance of private sector discipline from free entry and vigorous competition.

As we've seen with the PSDs, discipline is needed and the military, with its laws and codes built up over time is much better suited to the task (though by no means perfect itself). Somebody has to provide discipline and accountability, to make sure that rules of conduct are followed and people behave as honorably as possible under the circumstances. There is a role for the private provision of support for the military, but within war zones the military should maintain control when there is any question a all about the ability of the private sector to achieve a superior outcome, a condition that may be hard to meet.

Finally, as the article notes when essential services are privatized and both US and foreign firms are employed to carry out the tasks, if care is not taken in the reporting, then descriptions of the number of people needed to support the war will be misleading. The same is true for death and injuries. If care is not taken in reporting, these numbers will give a misleading view of the human cost of the war. It would be best if we didn't have to count at all, now or ever, but when we do we should accurately reflect the full costs of our actions.

Mencken, the prophet

You really have to start looking at the McClatchy newspapers, at least the Washington edition. Joe Galloway uses this quote from H.L. Mencken to riff on Bush:

" . . . all the odds are on the man who is, intrinsically, the most devious and mediocre — the man who can most easily (and) adeptly disperse the notion that his mind is a virtual vacuum. The presidency tends, year by year, to go to such men. As democracy is perfected, the office represents, more closely, the inner soul of the people. We move toward a lofty ideal. On some great and glorious day, the plain folks of the land will reach their heart's desire at last, and the White House will be adorned by a downright moron."

Read the full article here.

Now it's 78

Three weeks ago I reported that the Army had 73 investigations into fraud and corruption with regard to our efforts in Iraq. Yesterday, that number was up to 78 and the amount of money involved had jumped to $6 billion, with another $88 billion in contracts and programs being audited for financial irregularities.

The Pentagon admitted that they had "insufficient oversight of contracting officers' activities". This admission comes two years after Congress - believe it or not - recognized problems with military contracting and - mirabile dictu - actually passed legislation giving the Pentagon tools to correct the problems.

The first day of Fall

The changing of the season brings thoughts of other changes and Fall is an appropriate time to think of the American dollar.

In the late '90s I was working in Canada but being paid in U.S. dollars. The lowest exchange rate I got was $1.25 for each American dollar, $1.54 was the highest. My son still talks about the wonderful five-course meals we would get at Paul & Olivier, a bistro in Hull, for $15 American dollars. Yesterday, the dollars were at parity.

Five years ago we rented a villa outside of Florence for $1500 per week; the euro was worth about eighty cents. Now that the euro has topped $1.40 I wonder how much that villa would cost.

Me complain? Heck, no as our president tells me things are great here.

Alan all the time

He's everywhere - CBS, PBS, NPR. Every time I turn on the radio in my car, he's on talking about his book, The Age of Turbulence. He, as you've guessed, is Alan Greenspan, this week's media god.

He has a hell of a marketing force working for him, but there is such a thing as overkill and I think he's approaching it.