Cobbloviate

The Ol' Bloviator has been running for thirty-five years. (Here, "running" refers to the literal act of physically dragging one's body over several miles of the earth's surface and not to the figurative flight from reality, responsibility, and reason that has engaged the tormented O.B. ever since he was knee-high to the proverbial duck.) He actually  began running in an effort to hold down his weight, and by golly, he has. The scale currently shows our hero's displacement at about sixty pounds lower than it was when he was handed a diploma an unceremoniously shown the door of his high school back  in 1965.

For roughly ten years of his running career, the O.B. actually participated in road races of various lengths.  Built neither for comfort or speed, he tended to show up better in longer races, such as half and full marathons, where durability and a willingness to tolerate all manner of physical suffering counted for more than one's capacity for acceleration over the first 100 meters. In the course of training for and actually completing marathons, the O.B. has gotten at least a couple of sub-zero twenty milers (from his Iowa period) under his belt as well as a great many monsoonal runs of equal length. Once upon a time, when trained to his absolute prime, the O.B. managed to complete a marathon along the shores of Lake Superior in just a few seconds under three hours. Though they represented the only even marginally  noteworthy athletic achievement of his life, these were not exactly world class numbers, to be sure. Yet if the O.B represented no great threat to break the sound barrier, he at  managed to log  thousands of  miles of training and racing without inflicting major musculo-skeletal mayhem on himself. He has encountered numerous threats to his physical well being in all these years on the road, of course, including a couple of plugs excised from his rear end by unsupervised canines who clearly saw something they didn't like in the way he moved himself from point A to point B. There were also near-misses with lightning, rednecks in pick-up trucks, coeds in Beamers, and Hell's Angels wannabes. A couple of incidents actually required the O.B. to execute some desperate dodging maneuvers or fling himself into the ditch, etc. However, for all these years of pounding the pavement in all kinds of places under all kinds of conditions, there had never been a direct fender-meets-flesh-with-predictable-results encounter. Until this past Monday morning that is, when the driver of  a standing vehicle suddenly decided to make it  a moving vehicle just as the O.B. and one of his running buddies concluded that the operator of said motorcar had espied us and made a conscious decision to allow us to pass unmolested in our folly . (This is a cardinal rule for runners who plan to survive the potentially mean streets of any city. Try to make eye contact with a driver who is about to have you in his or her sights and if you can't or have any doubts whatsoever about the driver's intent, slam on your own brakes so hard that your sneakers smoke.)

In this case, since the vehicle in question had stayed put despite having both a clean shot at turning into the main thoroughfare and an unobstructed view of our approach, we determined that we might proceed with caution in front of the car. Just as we reached the point of no return, however, to our great dismay, the driver suddenly opted to get a move on. My running partner was about a stride ahead of me ( Yeah,I know, "Who ain't?") but positioned about midway back, and he threw out his arms to sort of bounce off the vehicle even as he was starting to yell like all getout. At that point, I thought--and damned sure hoped--the driver would stop because, try as I did so desperately, I knew there was no way that I could.  Yet, like a homicidal maniac on a grisly mission of death, she plowed right ahead, turning ever toward me as she ran squarely over my right ankle. I actually didn't have time to interpret the ensuing "CRUNCH!!" because the combination of my own momentum and her acceleration toward me produced a most unfortunate collision with her left front fender , which, with my ankle still pinned under her tire, propelled the rest of me  almost horizontally in the direction whence I came and left me  lying flat on my back on the pavement, where, luckily, the major force of impact was absorbed by the relatively non-critical zone that is the back of my head. Veteran runners will understand immediately  that even in that period of seemingly decelerated motion that always accompanies such traumatic events, on my way down, I was less worried about my brain  getting its first direct exposure to  daylight (or at least dawn) than about the chilling prospect that I might be forbidden to run the next morning.

            No one willing to make such a disclosure would ever dare dispute the old contention that "the Good Lord looks after fools and children." Assuming that no indication of the category where I belong is necessary, let's just say that the fact that my running companions include two world-class physicians certainly affirms the general contention that somebody or something was definitely looking out for me that day. Having somebody there with the credentials to run polite interference with very well-intentioned good Samaritans (of whom a gratifying number actually materialized) until the meat wagon made it to the scene was very important. The crew of said wagon were likewise surely God-sent, and I sensed I  was in good hands from there on out, as I, in fact,  I most assuredly was.

            The most disturbing occurence at the scene by far was the behavior of the driver who had knocked me cranium over keister in the first place. After apologizing and offering to drive me to the hospital--an offer that my physician buddies said I must decline because I needed services only an ambulance crew could provide--she headed off for parts unknown before the local constabulary had made it to the scene. This is my first and hopefully my last experience with this sort of thing, but I always thought hit-and-run drivers generally hit and, well, ran, without fooling with the niceties of an apology and the proffer of a ride to the hospital. Whether this is a new M.O. for hit'n runners remains to be seen, but according to the guardians of the law, stopping long enough to show your mama raised you to be polite even if she didn't teach you how to drive worth a damn counts for naught. Leaving the scene of an accident, especially where injuries have been sustained, is an offense not mitigated by a show of good manners.

            Meanwhile, after a couple of stiff shots of Dilaudid in the ER, I didn't particularly care that my ankle had been fractured in three places and that my convalescence in a cast and off the streets was likely to be a six-week process. When the Dilaudid euphoria began to fade, the Percocet kept the throbbing from my swollen leg at least partially at bay, but nothing took up the slack in making the prospect of six weeks of sedentary confinement seem any less bleak. There has been much discussion and debate over the last three decades or so about the nature or even the existence of the proverbial "runner's high." I'm not talking about the huge endorphin rush that I know for a fact follows a crisp twenty-miler. I'm more concerned about the much less dramatic but still addictive feeling of reaffirmation and confidence that I always take away my daily run. It may well be all downhill from there, but at least I'll know that I registered at least one solid accomplishment that day.

In  addition to this subtle little emotional buzz, I have to admit that I'll also miss the camaraderie that binds me to the fellow obessives who convene each weekday morning at 6:30 a.m. and Saturdays at 7:30 a.m.  for yet another session of merciless jibes, shameless gossip, out-and-out lies, oft-recycled anecdotes, and utterly juvenile attempts at humor which, by the way, begins either at the start or end or somewhere in the middle of a brisk run.

            All of the guys had checked on me within a couple of hours of my admission to the emergency room on Monday, but one of them made it a point to remind  me that, technically, I hadn't actually completed the morning run. In another couple of days, there will be emails and phone calls suggesting that the word is out that I've really started "porking-up" since I "quit" running. I wouldn't have it any other way, of course. People are often eager to attribute an individual's troubles to "running with the wrong crowd." In this case, although I didn't really need additional affirmation, my recent misfortune simply reminded me that I've definitely been running with the right one.

P.S. It's always frightening when someone else is relating your experience to a broad audience with only second-hand information at their disposal. Please note, however, the confidence exuded by those who are energetically interpreting it third hand. 

The Ol' Bloviator realizes he's asking a lot simply to expect readers to figure out what he's trying to say while they struggle valiantly to make it to the blessed relief that awaits them at the end of one of his typically lengthy and lugubrious posts.  Now, he's daring to ask you either to try to recall his last post or worse yet, actually go back and refresh your memory.  The reason for this imposition is that he wants to complexify the whole story of the efforts of China and other economically laggard societies to utilize the innovations and strategies devised in more advanced societies to narrow the distance between them and those societies.

 The last post hereabouts touched on native Chinese who come to the U.S. for training in science and engineering, etc. and return to China to put what they have learned over here to use in helping their homeland play catch-up.  In recent years, however, by no means all of the individuals who are part of their nation's efforts to leap forward by using insights and techniques devised elsewhere have found it necessary to relocate for extensive periods of time, thanks to the worldwide web, which has been the biggest, simplest and least expensive boon to global efforts to pole vault from Third World to First.  Despite all the bandwidth devoured by porn, fetishism, and other less elevated perversions that one encounters out there in the timeless, border-less, and largely lawless expanses of cyberspace, there's still more than plenty allotted to the serious exchange of data and ideas, and a great deal of it is available at no cost whatsoever to anyone who can scrounge up a functional laptop and hunker down someplace where the Wi-Fi flows freely.  Not only is all of this amazing stuff out there for the pilfering, but there are a multitude of vehicles available to help you locate the specific goodies for which search and spit them out on your desktop in a matter of nanoseconds.  Google is where we're headed, of course.  In addition to the general search engine, for the pointy-heads obsessed with info of the intricate and arcane variety, there's "Google Scholar" and "Google Books," both of which make billions of words of wisdom instantly available to folks who've never even carried a library card.

 Here's the rub, though.  Google also brings in just about everything that's out there roaming the Interweb vastness. Not only are there videos of  really fat guys who specialize in seducing chickens, but there's also a bunch of nonsense about human rights, individual freedoms, civil liberties and the injustice of totalitarian rule.  The people who run places like China are gung-ho about grabbing all the practical and scientific data they can use to give their nation a developed economy, but they ain't the least bit interested in foolish notions about the rights and needs of the masses and other such stuff that comes out of places where they believe a developed economy ought to be the means to a developed society as well.  Herein lies the conundrum confronting China's leadership in its current tiff with Google, which is threatening to hit the "delete" button on its "Google.cn"operation in that country because of what it perceives as possible government complicity in massive hacker assaults aimed not only at cracking into supposedly secure corporate information at Google and other large companies, but  also at "accessing the Gmail accounts of Chinese human rights activists."  These would be the folks most likely to imbibe of the aforementioned radical notions circulating among cyber gabbers based elsewhere.  There's also the possibility that these sensitive, hand-wringing sorts might be spilling their guts about what's really going on behind the glittery but extraordinarily thin facade of progress in China.

            As usual, in cases where its controversial aberrant practices have come under fire, China is trying to use its huge internet search market as leverage with Google, but where that tactic has succeeded in cooling things off with other corporate entities, let's face it, the Googlers ain't exactly your typical bunch of bottom-liners to begin with (although their fourth quarter net income was up fivefold over last year's in any event) and if anybody is going to stand up to Beijing, they're as good a bet as any. One thing's for sure, the young, upwardly mobile Chinese demographic is anything but keen on the idea of giving up Google, both as a vital research tool for students and a source of information about life in societies far more open and seemingly eventful than theirs. Most folks are inclined to assume that social upheavals arise from the suffering of the masses, and God knows, there's an abundance of that in China. Yet, my quick take on the entirety of human history sez the catalytic figures in most successful revolutions have been drawn from at least the more middling economic strata who find their own paths of ascent blocked by the same government or political entity that oppresses the masses so egregiously. I'm not predicting that the onset of Google deprivation will lead directly to the overthrow of the world's most capitalistic communist regime, but stay turned to this one folks, it'll be interesting, I'm pretty sure.

            Speaking of interesting, now that you've stretched those prodigious memory muscles of yours, let's do some real power lifting by recalling the numerous times that your humble bloviator warned President Obama against trying to take on health care until the economy was in better shape and people were less worried about losing their jobs, homes, and cars than about getting sick. But would he listen? Hell, no! Mr. Smooth-Confident-Cool-and-Deliberate waded right on in there, stuck that cherry bomb in the pile of cow plop and lit the fuse. Well, let's just say after Tuesday's explosion of red voting in the nation's bluest state, the green stuff on Oby's chin probably ain't pesto.  By his ill-timed excursion into the health-care minefield, the prez practically begged his enemies to attack him where he is most vulnerable, and they were only too happy to oblige.  Here was the socialist emerging from the closet, trying to foist yet another expensive "big government" program on the overburdened tax payers who were already dodging layoffs, foreclosures, and the repo man. As I have argued here more than once, most Americans would rather have the health care they've got than take a chance on anything they might be promised, and the notion that they might now be asked to pay for theirs and somebody else's as well was just more than a lot of them could handle. The hodgepodge plan that the Dems put together came across, rightly or not, as the consummate federal bureaucratic boondoggle and made the remarkably conservative Oby (by Democratic standards thus far) look like an old-fashioned taxer-and-spender extraordinaire. Had he eschewed this either arrogant or naïve (and possibly equal parts both) course and stuck with trying to put people back to work and protect the jobs that we still have, the "big government" charge would likely have seemed too risky to politicians fearful of seeming indifferent to economic suffering and distress among people who were not especially accustomed to it. As a matter of fact, when it comes to helping these folks get back on their feet, government can't get too expansive or expensive. It's only when it stoops to help those who have spent most of their lives on their knees that it starts to get too "big" or intrusive.

There's no good spin that the denizens of Obamaland can put on the loss of Teddy Kennedy's seat to a Republican--albeit one not particularly eager to advertise the fact--who once posed au naturel for the cougars over at Cosmo. (Content Advisory:  "Don't look, Ethel!".)

On the other hand, for all the damage Oby has done to his approval ratings in the health-care fiasco, I can't find any poll anywhere suggesting that disappointment with him is making the Republicans seem any more appealing.  I can, however, find polls  showing that nearly 80 percent of the voters in last Tuesday's election cited  "electing a candidate who will strengthen the economy and create more good jobs" as their first priority, and that 56 percent of those who complained about a bad economy voted for Brown.

 I rest my case, whatever it was.

I normally don't pay much nevermind to what happens way up there in the Ivy League, particularly during football season, but I was intrigued by this New York Times piece about Professor Shi Yigonga, a Johns Hopkins-trained Chinese molecular biologist at Princeton who is heading back to his old stomping grounds after eighteen years in this country, during which he won much acclaim, brought in a ton of grant money, and established himself as the head pointy-head in a big bucks research lab at Princeton. Not only is Professor Shi, a naturalized American citizen, resigning his prestigious post at Princeton, but like ol' Sarah Palin and the "Bridge to Nowhere," he is saying, "Thanks, but no thanks" to a hard-to-come-by $10-million research grant from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute. He's chucking all this, it seems, to become the dean of life services at his undergraduate alma mater, Tsinghua University in Beijing.

Shi's departure left Princeton administrators shocked and dismayed, but the boys in Beijing apparently made him more promises than Alabama offered Nick Saban, and they no doubt expect a comparable bang for their buck--or yuan, actually. This successful seduction of Shi, the Times writer observes, reflects the determination of Chinese leaders to "reverse the drain of top talent that accompanied its opening to the outside world over the past three decades." This appraisal is no doubt correct for the long haul, but for now, I'd say China is simply harvesting the fruits of having its best and brightest trained and supported in their ongoing professional development by the nation that Chinese leaders have undertaken to overtake. A Georgia Tech study, (for whatever that might be worth,) now predicts that in a decade or so China's rapidly increasing investment in research and development will vault it ahead of the United States in its capacity to turn R & D into marketable products.

Now don't get me wrong, here, I'm not about to go all Lou Dobbs on you, nor am I suggesting that Professor Shi did not more than earn his keep while at Princeton. What I am saying, however, is that anyone who has attended a graduate school commencement ceremony in the last twenty years has seen the globalization of American knowledge and expertise firsthand. Not that this is anything new. Those who can't believe that a place so "backward" as China in so many respects can actually be breathing down our necks should consider the case of the Russians who developed the atomic and hydrogen bombs and put men into space while their soldiers were still wearing coats sent to their predecessors under Lend-Lease in 1941 and the civilian population was struggling to survive on a steady diet of borscht, stale bread, and vodka. As he often did, Lewis Grizzard put the whole thing in a nutshell back in the 1990s when he demanded to know how a nation that could succeed in sending a man to the moon could fail so miserably at making toilet paper. The answer, of course, was priorities, and somehow more and better rump ribbon just didn't seem as important to the Kremliniskis  as becoming as militarily powerful and technologically advanced as the United States. ( Thank goodness I'm not just your typical juvenile  punster, or I might suggest here that the Russkie leaders were more interested in wiping us out than out-wiping us.)

What we're talking about here is nothing more or less than the same process by which, over the centuries, "follower" nations, not excluding ours at the outset, have managed to "short cut" the modernization process by taking advantage of the developments and discoveries achieved by more advanced, "leader" societies. If the descendants of  Barney Rubble and Fred Flintstone could see that  that there was no need for them to reinvent the wheel, after all,  then it's not exactly surprising that many centuries later the Russians would be copying everything we did or had, all the while claiming credit for inventing it themselves, of course.  

The ability to speed up the process of economic modernization   by learning from other societies' advances and embracing their innovations was a good thing in many ways, but not all. By the 1960s, for example, southern development leaders had begun to realize they could take advantage of the highly specialized nature of modern factory work, along with major advances in training techniques  to short-cut the protracted and expensive process of developing a generally better-educated workforce by offering custom-tailored, state-funded "start-up" training programs as enticements to incoming industries.   Now available in every southern state and many others as well, these programs can supply an up-to-speed labor force practically from the first day of operation.

 The promise of such a program doubtless helped to allay BMW's concerns about the educational deficiencies of South Carolina workers. Elsewhere, despite Alabama's consistent last or near-last standing in national educational rankings, only a threatened lawsuit by a teachers group prevented Governor Fob James from raiding the state's school fund in 1995 to pay off the remainder of its subsidy pledge to Mercedes, whose entire workforce had already been custom-trained at state expense . Meanwhile, over in that neighboring citadel of educational excellence, Mississippi, when the state promised $80 million to train 4,000 workers for a new Nissan production facility, the cost per worker was more than four times its annual per-pupil expenditures in grades K-12. Mississippi clung desperately to forty-eighth place in a respected national ranking of state school systems in 2006, but delighted at the dramatic savings in their start-up costs, Nissan and other international employers seemed no more concerned than their domestic counterparts about whether their workers have ever taken algebra, much less written an essay or read a sonnet.

In 2007, a ranking of states according to their capacity to participate in the new "Knowledge-Based" global economy showed South Carolina and Connecticut effectively sharing the distinction of having the nation's highest percentage of workers employed by foreign companies, with North Carolina, Kentucky, and Tennessee also placing in the top thirteen in this category. In outright defiance of what had once been the  traditional wisdom, however, for all their success in attracting foreign direct investment, these four states were also among the ten southern states clustered in the bottom fourteen in rankings of the educational levels of their work forces.

Although this attempt to circumvent rather than solve the South's educational problems has brought more and better jobs to some communities in the short run, we might take  a quick glance at the places where, a half-century or more ago, local leaders had decided to mortgage their town's social and institutional future by wooing footloose northern industries with promises cheap labor, construction subsidies, tax exemptions and guarantees of protection from  unions or higher wage competition.  These days, a great many-- probably most--such communities have long since bade goodbye to their one-time industrial benefactors who skipped town in a hurry once they heard about the even warmer hospitality awaiting them in places like Honduras or Bangladesh. In the wake of their departures, meanwhile, their former hosts are enjoying little success in bringing in new employers for relatively high-wage (by global standards) labor with only low-wage skills. Such are the fruits of trying to achieve a developed economy at the expense of a developed society.

The poster state for such a developmental approach is Dr. Shi's China, of course.  Shi explained that he returned to his homeland because "I felt I owed China something," and the Times notes that like Shi, other recently repatriated scientists are also " lured by their patriotism, their desire to serve as catalysts for change and their belief that the Chinese government will back them."   Given the aims of Chinese leaders, the latter belief is likely well-founded.  As to the kinds of "change" they manage to catalyze, however, it remains to be seen whether they will lighten or merely increase the suffering of the sorely neglected millions of Chinese people who have thus far borne the burden of their nation's efforts to take the shortcut to modernity.

I normally don't pay much nevermind to what happens way up there in the Ivy League, particularly during football season, but I was intrigued by this New York Times piece about Professor Shi Yigonga, a Johns Hopkins-trained Chinese molecular biologist at Princeton who is heading back to his old stomping grounds after eighteen years in this country, during which he won much acclaim, brought in a ton of grant money, and established himself as the head pointy-head in a big bucks research lab at Princeton. Not only is Professor Shi, a naturalized American citizen, resigning his prestigious post at Princeton, but like ol' Sarah Palin and the "Bridge to Nowhere," he is saying, "Thanks, but no thanks" to a hard-to-come-by $10-million research grant from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute. He's chucking all this, it seems, to become the dean of life services at his undergraduate alma mater, Tsinghua University in Beijing.

Shi's departure left Princeton administrators shocked and dismayed, but the boys in Beijing apparently made him more promises than Alabama offered Nick Saban, and they no doubt expect a comparable bang for their buck--or yuan, actually. This successful seduction of Shi, the Times writer observes, reflects the determination of Chinese leaders to "reverse the drain of top talent that accompanied its opening to the outside world over the past three decades." This appraisal is no doubt correct for the long haul, but for now, I'd say China is simply harvesting the fruits of having its best and brightest trained and supported in their ongoing professional development by the nation that Chinese leaders have undertaken to overtake. A Georgia Tech study, (for whatever that might be worth,) now predicts that in a decade or so China's rapidly increasing investment in research and development will vault it ahead of the United States in its capacity to turn R & D into marketable products.

Now don't get me wrong, here, I'm not about to go all Lou Dobbs on you, nor am I suggesting that Professor Shi did not more than earn his keep while at Princeton. What I am saying, however, is that anyone who has attended a graduate school commencement ceremony in the last twenty years has seen the globalization of American knowledge and expertise firsthand. Not that this is anything new. Those who can't believe that a place so "backward" as China in so many respects can actually be breathing down our necks should consider the case of the Russians who developed the atomic and hydrogen bombs and put men into space while their soldiers were still wearing coats sent to their predecessors under Lend-Lease in 1941 and the civilian population was struggling to survive on a steady diet of borscht, stale bread, and vodka. As he often did, Lewis Grizzard put the whole thing in a nutshell back in the 1990s when he demanded to know how a nation that could succeed in sending a man to the moon could fail so miserably at making toilet paper. The answer, of course, was priorities, and somehow more and better rump ribbon just didn't seem as important to the Kremliniskis  as becoming as militarily powerful and technologically advanced as the United States. ( Thank goodness I'm not just your typical juvenile  punster, or I might suggest here that the Russkie leaders were more interested in wiping us out than out-wiping us.)

What we're talking about here is nothing more or less than the same process by which, over the centuries, "follower" nations, not excluding ours at the outset, have managed to "short cut" the modernization process by taking advantage of the developments and discoveries achieved by more advanced, "leader" societies. If the descendants of  Barney Rubble and Fred Flintstone could see that  that there was no need for them to reinvent the wheel, after all,  then it's not exactly surprising that many centuries later the Russians would be copying everything we did or had, all the while claiming credit for inventing it themselves, of course.  

The ability to speed up the process of economic modernization   by learning from other societies' advances and embracing their innovations was a good thing in many ways, but not all. By the 1960s, for example, southern development leaders had begun to realize they could take advantage of the highly specialized nature of modern factory work, along with major advances in training techniques  to short-cut the protracted and expensive process of developing a generally better-educated workforce by offering custom-tailored, state-funded "start-up" training programs as enticements to incoming industries.   Now available in every southern state and many others as well, these programs can supply an up-to-speed labor force practically from the first day of operation.

 The promise of such a program doubtless helped to allay BMW's concerns about the educational deficiencies of South Carolina workers. Elsewhere, despite Alabama's consistent last or near-last standing in national educational rankings, only a threatened lawsuit by a teachers group prevented Governor Fob James from raiding the state's school fund in 1995 to pay off the remainder of its subsidy pledge to Mercedes, whose entire workforce had already been custom-trained at state expense . Meanwhile, over in that neighboring citadel of educational excellence, Mississippi, when the state promised $80 million to train 4,000 workers for a new Nissan production facility, the cost per worker was more than four times its annual per-pupil expenditures in grades K-12. Mississippi clung desperately to forty-eighth place in a respected national ranking of state school systems in 2006, but delighted at the dramatic savings in their start-up costs, Nissan and other international employers seemed no more concerned than their domestic counterparts about whether their workers have ever taken algebra, much less written an essay or read a sonnet.

In 2007, a ranking of states according to their capacity to participate in the new "Knowledge-Based" global economy showed South Carolina and Connecticut effectively sharing the distinction of having the nation's highest percentage of workers employed by foreign companies, with North Carolina, Kentucky, and Tennessee also placing in the top thirteen in this category. In outright defiance of what had once been the  traditional wisdom, however, for all their success in attracting foreign direct investment, these four states were also among the ten southern states clustered in the bottom fourteen in rankings of the educational levels of their work forces.

Although this attempt to circumvent rather than solve the South's educational problems has brought more and better jobs to some communities in the short run, we might take  a quick glance at the places where, a half-century or more ago, local leaders had decided to mortgage their town's social and institutional future by wooing footloose northern industries with promises cheap labor, construction subsidies, tax exemptions and guarantees of protection from  unions or higher wage competition.  These days, a great many-- probably most--such communities have long since bade goodbye to their one-time industrial benefactors who skipped town in a hurry once they heard about the even warmer hospitality awaiting them in places like Honduras or Bangladesh. In the wake of their departures, meanwhile, their former hosts are enjoying little success in bringing in new employers for relatively high-wage (by global standards) labor with only low-wage skills. Such are the fruits of trying to achieve a developed economy at the expense of a developed society.

The poster state for such a developmental approach is Dr. Shi's China, of course.  Shi explained that he returned to his homeland because "I felt I owed China something," and the Times notes that like Shi, other recently repatriated scientists are also " lured by their patriotism, their desire to serve as catalysts for change and their belief that the Chinese government will back them."   Given the aims of Chinese leaders, the latter belief is likely well-founded.  As to the kinds of "change" they manage to catalyze, however, it remains to be seen whether they will lighten or merely increase the suffering of the sorely neglected millions of Chinese people who have thus far borne the burden of their nation's efforts to take the shortcut to modernity.

Although,incredibly enough, ABC news has sniffed out Ol' Umar's  undies, so to speak , I must note that, even more incredibly under the circumstances, they  seem remarkably devoid of skid marks.

Our aforementioned offspring and I also shared a hearty guffaw when Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano (Should we really have somebody in this job whose name reminds everybody of a pizza joint?) declared that Umar's botched self-detonation was evidence that the "system worked."  Yeah, right, provided the would-be suicide bomber is a putz and he has some fellow passengers bold and burly enough to put a chokehold on him when he can't manage to ignite the payload in his pants.   After this incident, aspiring airline terrorists should at least be on notice that the days of seizing a jumbo jet with a nail file are probably over.  We understand now that you lunatics are not just trying to take over the plane for a long weekend in Havana.  Don't be thinking that ol' Umar scorched his privates for naught, however.   The apprehension we felt and sensed among our fellow fliers and airline and security personnel on the way home on Monday reminded me of an op-ed piece that I wrote for the Hotlanta paper on September 12, 2001, pointing out that for all our military might, there'd been precious little time since FDR's vaunted "four freedoms" speech in 1941 when we could really claim that we were enjoying freedom from fear.  Now, more than eight years and a  pair of badly singed drawers later, I'm even more skeptical that we are likely ever to know that feeling again.

*The Ol' Bloviator knows full well that he will be accused of stealing this title from the N.Y. Post, but take it from me and Jerry Lee, there is a world of difference between "balls of fire" and "balls on fire."

Although his ode to "Trees" was the first piece of verse committed to memory by several generations of American schoolchildren, Alfred Joyce Kilmer had a lot to overcome, including the fact that his parents chose to identify him by his middle name.  After surviving what, one presumes, were dozens of playground brawls about his moniker, Kilmer had the further  misfortune to become a poet whose work not only made sense but actually rhymed.  This, of course, amounted to the kiss of death among literary critics, so much so, that the effete highbrows at his alma mater,Columbia, now pay homage to him with an annual "Bad Poetry Contest." 

As I first did some four years ago, I beg to offer Joyce Kilmer's "Kings'" which might not be great poetry, but still strikes me as damn good and ironic insight, worthy both of the immediate season and the times in which we live:

The Kings of the earth are men of might,
And cities are burned for their delight,
And the skies rain death in the silent night,
And the hills belch death all day!
But the King of Heaven, Who made them all,
Is fair and gentle, and very small;
He lies in the straw, by the oxen's stall --

I posted this verse in 2005 as part of a critique of a warrior president who seemed to believe he had been elected king.  Now, here it is again,even as the winner of the  Nobel Peace Prize who is our new commander-in-chief orders the escalation of American involvement in Afghanistan on the premise that this is the best way to achieve peace in that region. To invoke an old analogy,  fighting for peace strikes me as about as efficacious as  fornicating for chastity, and  any  "peace" achieved by wielding the proverbial big stick is likely to last only until the other guy finds a bigger stick.

As you can see here, Joyce Kilmer knew about these things, for he served in the vaunted "War to End all wars," and died in 1918, about a year after he wrote "Kings," reportedly killed by a sniper at the Second Battle of the Marne.
Obviously, the Ol' Bloviator is in a bit of a somber mood right now, but he hasn't forgotten that this is supposed to be a season of hope and good cheer, and it is in that spirit that he presents the second annual Redneck Festival of Lights (Mash below) as may be witnessed any evening these days in front of the humble abode that he shares with the longsuffering Ms. OB, who, needless to say, both enjoys and deserves the deepest sympathies of the neighbors.  If you can't come by to admire the Ol' Bloviator's artistry firsthand, let me wish you the happiest and safest of holidays.  In other words, as they used to say in the country,"Have a good'un," or as they still say over at Ga. Tech, "Felice Bobby Dodd!"

 Xmas Truck.AVI

This kind of cold fury, articulated so beautifully in song  by the "Rockabilly Filly," Rosie Flores, seems ready to explode from many an angry breast these days.   The hell of it is, though, a good many of the objects of our wrath just don't seem to care or even to realize that we're royally pissed.

For the benefit of some of you misguided--or, more likely, simply perverse--souls who do not embrace college football as the true epicenter of the human experience, the performance of the University of Georgia's football team this season has been not simply underwhelming but, in great measure, downright embarrassing. Famously stoic to the point of apparent catatonia, Mark Richt, our coach, has been catching a lot of flak in the media and on the blogs, but to hear him tell it, he is oblivious to all the controversy. According to Richt, at church, which he never misses, "Someone will say, 'I'm praying for you,' and I'm like, 'Man, it must be pretty bad out there.'"

In addition to the fact that our coach sounds like a Valley Girl, this observation is sad on too many levels to enumerate. One of them, certainly, is that anybody would think it necessary or proper to pester God about the fortunes of somebody whose salary is north of $3 million annually. The second is that anyone can actually haul in this much loot for a job that involves nothing more than slapping a bunch of 18-22 year olds on the butt for roughly five months a year and giving a few speeches to a bunch of guys who are generally disposed to be putty in the hands of anyone who has "coach" hung before his name. Perhaps there is no sadder aspect here, however, than Richt's apparent surprise that a guy who makes roughly forty times as much as the poor saps who are trying to teach the guys whose butts he slaps could somehow be subjected to genuinely critical scrutiny by a second group of even bigger saps who write the checks that pay his big salary. Sorry coach, when you're getting $250 K per game win or lose, you better not make a habit of losing because even a super-devout Jesus-man like you doesn't get that kind of pass, especially when you're 6-4 with what many think is 9-1 talent. (Let's face it, at least the bailed-out banker-shysters [see below] made money when they were feasting on a steady diet of ours.)

This little tempest in the local tea pot pales rapidly into insignificance, of course, compared to the current uproar over the arrogance of the Wall Street banking crowd. These would be the people whose unbridled greed and flagrant dishonesty took us to the brink of economic destruction just a few months back and who are now looking to collect bonuses that make the likes of Mark Richt look like a food-stamp qualifier. The architects of the 1929 crash that ushered in the Great Depression at least had the decency to throw themselves off window ledges, for God's sake! Now, eighty years later, instead of splattering themselves on the pavement, their contemporary counterparts don't even feel enough shame or embarrassment to turn down obscenely large bonuses that should rightly be going instead to all the folks whose lives they ruined.

Take "Goldmine" Sachs, as Maureen Dowd so aptly refers to it, where a former banker and one-time employee insists, the culture is "completely money-obsessed. . . There's always room--need--for more. If you're not getting a bigger house or a bigger boat, you're falling behind." It was such greed, sufficient to make Gordon Gecko seem downright altruistic, that led the Goldminers, along with their soul mates at "More-Gain" Stanley and J. P. "More-Gain" to throw a good many of us eager to board the retirement bus under said bus instead, thanks to their various finaglements.  Their true reward should have been a choice spot selling apples on the windiest corner in Chicago. Instead they're preening and strutting around talking about how well they've done operating with our bailout funds.

            Now this unholy trio alone is about to reward their mendacious minions to the tune of roughly $30 billion (Yes, that's a "b"), a 60 percent increase over last year's forkover. Meanwhile, this bunch is no doubt well along in the process of conjuring up more imaginary assets to fuel more of the creative investment "vehicles" that directly or indirectly carried a lot of the bankrupt, unemployed Americans straight into the quicksand that's lapping at their earlobes today.

            Bad as the shameless arrogance of the moneychangers is, even it ain't as bad as the apparent obliviousness of the Obama crowd, who are cheerfully serving as enablers for this bunch of thieves. Some say Oby himself has bent over backward for Wall Street, but I'd say he's gone to 90 degrees in precisely the opposite direction. One thing for sure, his treasury secretary, Timothy Geitner, seems to have made squealing like a pig his sole purpose in life, as he goes merrily about, defending loopholes that will undermine efforts to regulate these damnable "derivatives" that have done such a number on so many people in so many places. The Oby crowd's pandering to Wall Street puts the Republicans, who have defended this sort of chicanery for eons, way back in the deep shade. In fact, even if the Repubs wanted to lip lock the butt cheeks of the barons of finance, they'd have to elbow their way through a passel of Democrats, not to mention the folks at the CDC who laid some 200 doses of H1N1 vaccine on the crowd at Goldman while leaving scads of  New Yorkers in the supposedly high-priority, "at-risk" categories (children, pregnant women, and young adults under 24) to fend for their insignificant selves.   Although bonafide "at-riskers" are probably in short supply in their shop, Goldman reportedly had asked for 5,400 hits of the vaccine.  To be fair to them, they probably didn't realize that swine flu seems to pose no threat to actual swine. Still, although the relationship between "swine" and "flu" seems purely eponymous (Look it up!) at this point, if I were one of the "bonus babies," I don't think I'd blow any of my loot just now on a trip to Egypt, where, choosing to err on the side of caution, epidemic-wary officials simply sent the entire pig population to that big smoke house in the sky.

* © SONY/ATV SONGS D/B/A TREE PUBG CO

October 30, 2009, was a day of some note for many of us in these parts, and not just not because it was the eve of both Halloween and our annual gridiron ass-kicking at the hands of the Florida Gators that, every bit as reliably as death and taxes, was certain to come on the morrow. Because October 30 was also our “Fall Break” day, which magically coincides with a Friday when two-thirds of our young charges would be in Jacksonville even if classes were held, the powers that is designated this occasion as the first of our six unpaid currently scheduled “furlough” days this academic year. Since I have faced a gazillion queries about how I would spend my “day off,” I decided to keep a record of my activities on this historic date.

Before I begin, let me explain that although we were under strict orders not to set foot on campus when furloughed, for most university faculty worth their salt, a day away from the office is NOT a day off. Au contraire, as they love to say over in Tallapoosa, if anything it’s actually a day when the pressure for achievement gets ramped up, because there’s no excuse for not getting something done, given the absence of the normal distractions afforded by whining students, frustrated colleagues, or a mailbox full of incomprehensible and irrelevant directions from the higher-ups. What it boils down to is that our vaunted, much-begrudged professorial “freedom” to work on our own schedules can be as much a curse as a blessing. After all, if you can choose when to work, then there’s no such thing as time off, just situations when you could be working but aren’t. Since professorin’ is one of those occupations that will automatically absorb as much time and effort as it receives and always give indication that more could be done, lingering guilt-free over the morning paper is an unknown pleasure for us. Ditto for watching “Sports Center” or re-runs of “Bewitched” or shooting the breeze with your neighbor, who hasn’t hit a lick after five or on Saturday in all the time you’ve known him. You might not be on the man's clock very much, but any time you're not, you’re automatically on yours, and while nobody else may know whether you’re working or not, you always will.

All of this is to explain why I arose from the breakfast table on October 30 at 8:30 a.m. (Relax, I got up at 5:45 am. to run, then showered, etc.), determined to establish a first-ever-furlough-day productivity record that I could fling back at anybody who asked about my “day off.” First came the daily ritual of knocking down a few of my 359 unread emails, of which roughly a third consist of advice on how to unleash my true sexual potential. (Dubious—and actually downright frightening---as this prospect may seem, all of these have to be checked nonetheless to ensure that none have been forwarded from a computer registered with the Missus.) Another third of the messages are from the likes of Joba Kenhatti in Nigeria, where I have just won the lottery and may claim my winnings simply by dispatching posthaste a cashier’s check for $56,789. Some of the final third of the emails may actually have some bearing on my life and career, but fifteen minutes in, I don’t find any and give it up for the day.

First up on the regular agenda then is a document that must be scanned in and converted to a pdf file by Monday. Then there is an exam to be made out for Thursday, an unread dissertation and a brief speech to write for next Friday. Beyond, behind, and hulking over all these tasks, of course, is the abominable, unfinished book manuscript (due at the press finally and fully “and by God, this time we mean it!” on December 1, 2009) that has thus far resisted my earnest efforts at rendering it print-worthy with an obduracy that would make a mule or camel seem blissfully compliant by comparison.

Speaking of obduracy, I can’t even get the scanner software to run because “file hpqztrstwz.dgt was missing and could not be found,” it seems. Three hours later, I find said file myself, but the persnickety digital demon implanted in my household by Dell refuses to recognize it until, an hour later, I decide to copy it into a new folder, and “Eureka!” the software opens. Hot Damn! Ready to scan at last, I click on “scan to” only to discover that the “program cannot find a valid scan destination.” Ah yes, I’ve heard that pathetic excuse before. When I finally track down the English version of the “Help” menu, it says uninstall the software, reboot, re-install the software, reboot—been there, done that a dozen times already, of course.

There has to be another way, but damned if I can find it. It’s now 2:30 p.m., still no lunch and only one response to nature since 8:30 a.m. (I know you didn’t really need the latter info, but this is a comprehensive record, remember!) I take a five-minute break for a pack of “Toastchees,” and a quick glance on the web reveals the usual idiots predicting a Georgia win tomorrow. I’m starting to panic just a bit now because I’m six hours in and nothing on my checklist is actually checked. How about clearing my head with a little reaffirming foray into editing the despised manuscript? All goes well for a page or two, then there’s no footnote for a key paragraph on page 243. Where the hell did I get that from? Searching the web and computer for an hour yields nothing, and after trying to clarify a couple of passages in the text, I put down the manuscript, now with several paragraphs hopelessly obscured by illegible scrawl.

It’s quarter to five by now, and not a scan has even been attempted. Fighting back the unmistakable craving for an ice-cold brewski that, on Fridays especially, is far more reliable than any timepiece in alerting me to the dwindling of the day, I stare sullenly at the monitor until I see for the first time a “Scan Document” button and start clicking the hell out of it. At this point, the long-suffering Ms. OB accedes to my pathetic whimpering for help, and we succeed somehow in stuffing twenty-one pages of text down Mr. Scan-Man’s previously obstructed throat.

Positively tingling in anticipation of my first gulp of Sammy and fistful of Chex-Mix, I suddenly realize that the scanned documents are in photo, not pdf format. (As best I can recall, this would be the point where I took the USS Invective for an extended cruise in the truly uncharted sectors of the Sea of Profanity.) The offending files can be converted, I eventually find, but it’s clear from the start this is not a task for the faint of heart or the sorely-in-need-of a-beer. Just when I finally think I’ve finally cleared by last little hurdle, my exultance evaporates into despair once again. I have twenty-one separate pdfs, it seems, instead of the single comprehensive one I need. The pages can be combined, the cryptic “Help” page insists without explaining precisely how, and this too proves a monumental challenge for a guy with peanut butter gumming up his key board. Still, sometime around 6:30 p.m. I discover that I finally have a twenty-one-page document rather than twenty-one separate documents.

All that remains is a final check to see that everything is in order. Uh, oh! How the hell did I miss that typo in the first sentence on the first page? Unfortunately, I can’t fix it on the pdf but have to correct it in the original and then re-scan, then reconvert, then figure out how to insert it in the appropriate page order. Finally, this is done, and seeing that it is now 8:15 p.m., I decide that maybe it would be best to postpone the final review till tomorrow even if this means a furlough-day grade of “Incomplete.” Staggering downstairs toward a refrigerator that is clearly feeling neglected, and rightly so, I encounter Ms. OB, who, perhaps feeling a bit neglected herself, avers with frightful conviction that another furlough episode like this will drive her to peruse the Yellow Pages, under “Divorce Attorneys, think ‘Piranha at Feeding Time.’” “Don’t worry,” sez I, “they couldn’t pay me to go through a day like this again.”

The weight of the Ol’ Bloviator’s teaching and writing obligations, not to mention his moonlighting as a windbag-for-hire (who works cheap, if you need one, by the way) continues to keep him cyber-sidelined most of the time just now, but he begs your indulgence as he offers his belated take on the Nobelobamadrama. Ludicrous as it may seem in some ways, Barry O. is far from the weirdest choice the Nobelniks have made. After hall, he was preceded in Oslo by the likes of Henry the K., who bombed his way to the Vietnam peace table in 1973, and then, of course, in 1994 there was the former terrorist Yessir You’reaFart, who reigns unchallenged as the ugliest Nobel laureate ever. Obviously the Nobel Peace Prize has gone to some fairly pugnacious folks over the years and never more so than when it was bestowed on President Theodore Roosevelt (the first American so honored), who was one of the most war-like people who ever traipsed the planet. Oslo came calling after TR stepped in to negotiate a settlement in the Russo-Japanese War in 1905. Having accused William McKinley of having a “chocolate-éclair backbone” for his reluctance to declare war on Spain in 1898, then assistant secretary of the Navy Theodore Roosevelt pushed vigorously for American intervention against Spain in Cuba on all fronts, encouraging the famed Hearst newspaper syndicate to step up the sensationalist reporting (or fabricating) other wise known as “yellow journalism” that so effectively inflamed American public opinion in favor of war.
Not content to see his country at war, Roosevelt was determined to go mix it up himself. He resigned his post in the Navy Department to raise his own fabled regiment of “Rough Riders,” whose somewhat exaggerated conquest of San Juan Hill emboldened Roosevelt to nominate himself for the Congressional Medal of Honor. Suffice it to say, Roosevelt the Warrior had not suddenly become Roosevelt the Pacifist by 1905. On the contrary, he really would have preferred to allow the combatants in the Russo-Japanese rumble to fight to the last man, or at least, as he put it, “see the war ending with Russia and Japan locked in a clinch, counterweighing one another, and both kept weak by the effort.” His overriding concern in the matter, however, was that the outcome of the war should not be decisive enough to upset the balance of power in Asia and threaten our expanding economic and strategic presence there. In the end, the settlement that TR brokered, or imposed, satisfied neither side, especially not the Japanese, who had gained the upper hand in the conflict and really got their lips all pooched out after the militant mediator failed to secure the reparations payments he had indicated might be forthcoming from Russia. Feeling a bit betrayed, the Japanese came away from the affair harboring deep suspicions of America’s intentions toward them and Asia in general.
Wary of the Japanese, but determined they not get uppity, TR did nothing to alleviate their concerns in 1907 when he ordered four naval squadrons, otherwise known as “the Great White Fleet,” on a two-year, round-the-world cruise, which, oh, by the way, just happened to include a week-long stopover in Yokohama, where school children waving American flags greeted the flotilla. While they professed to be honored by this visit, Japanese leaders knew full well, of course, that what they were witnessing was an elaborately (and expensively) staged example of Roosevelt’s “Big-Stick” (as in “speak softly” and carry one) diplomacy. Fresh from their own recent butt-thrashing of the Russkie Navy, however, the Japanese were not terribly impressed, nor were they disabused of their suspicions of U.S. intentions. TR didn’t live to see it, of course, but these hard feelings would come back to haunt his cousin Franklin early one Sunday morning in 1941.
This is not to blame ol’ TR for World War II or to excuse in any way the buck-naked Japanese aggression that precipitated it. Still, this was certainly one case where a Nobel laureate’s efforts to maintain peace contributed to a long-term outcome where lots of people got shot. Another example came along just fifteen years later when another U.S. president, Woodrow Wilson, was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for his role in creating the League of Nations as part of his promise to make World War I the “war to end all wars.” No sooner had the United States finally entered the nearly three-year-old fray against the Germans in 1917 (much to the delight of an aging TR, of course) than Double-W began spoutin’ off about how our Allies (primarily France and Great Britain) were really pursuing a non-punitive “peace without victory,” which he presumed to outline in the famous Fourteen Points, , unilaterally declaring them to be the war aims of all the Allies.
By 1918 all these pledges about “respect for national boundaries” and “self-determination of nations” didn’t sound half-bad to the wobbling but not yet totally whipped Germans (who would later claim that they would never have agreed to an armistice had Wilson not promised them a settlement they could live with happily thereafter.) Unfortunately for poor ol’ Woody, the Brits and Frenchies had been seeing their toes rot off in them trenches and breathing in that raunchy German mustard gas for more than four years by the time peace finally broke out, and they were not about to let any high-minded idealist-come-lately stand between them and making Germany pay out the kerdoodle. Unwilling to trust anyone else with his dream of securing a “League of Nations,” which would have the ostensible means to render any future war all but impossible, Wilson himself led our delegation to the peace conference at Versailles. He was overmatched from the start against the wily Allied diplomats who sensed Woody would agree to just about anything in order to keep his precious League intact. In the long run, instead of the “peace without victory” they had been promised, the Germans were stripped of more than 10 percent of both their population and land area in Europe, plus all of their colonies elsewhere, and saddled with what would eventually add up to a cool $32 billion in reparations payments. You don’t need me to tell you, I’m sure, that the protracted economic suffering that almost inevitably ensued was made to order for a certain whacked-out Austrian corporal, who capitalized on German pain and pride in order to get himself installed as dictator and went on to makes his bones as a tin-horn tyrant by proceeding to grab back all the land and people that the Treaty of Versailles had taken away.
Meanwhile, Wilson who had left everything but the family jewels on the table in Versailles in order to get everybody else at the conference to sign off on his precious League of Nations, would, ironically enough, wind up strangling his own brainchild by refusing to accept the modest amendments to the League charter that were offered by Senate Republicans. Despite its rejection by the United States, the League limped along through the isolationist 1920s and 1930s before showing itself utterly incapable of slowing down, much less stopping the fascist juggernaut fashioned by Hitler and Mussolini. By banking too heavily on the dream that had inspired his Nobel selection, Woodrow Wilson had unwittingly made World War II, if not inevitable, a lot more likely than it might otherwise have been.
Back in the Here and Now, the Nobel folks based their recognition of Oby on his “vision” on issues like nuclear disarmament, climate change, and human rights and “the concept that those who are to lead the world must do so on the basis of the values and attitudes that are shared by the majority of the world’s population.” The left-leaning Oslo crowd may have thought they were doing Obama a favor by encouraging him to act as if he is president of the world, but if so, they have simply demonstrated once again their total tone-deafness where American politics is concerned. Last I knew, the only place over which the latest Nobel Peace laureate had been elected to preside was the U.S. of By-God A., and things ain’t going so swimmingly over here right now, in case they haven’t noticed. Oby already had a lot of people complaining that he cared more about polishing his image elsewhere than doing his job to the satisfaction of the folks back home; so this may be a case where the Nobel recognition will have to be lived down before it can be lived up to. Beyond that, if they’re giving out awards for admirable intentions instead of solid accomplishments, I think it’s high time I got some credit for my lifelong crusade to stamp out death by natural causes, not to mention my selfless dedication to outlawing taxes on beer. Our president clearly has good intentions, but then so did Woodrow Wilson and even Theodore Roosevelt, in his own way. Good intentions may well be enough to get him to Oslo, but both history and folk wisdom suggest that Oby had best think carefully about where they might take him from there.