IS THIS TRIP NECESSARY? Does a real war require real sacrifices on the part of the civilian population? Andrew Sullivan suggests that it does.

We're at war. So far, the Bush Administration has refused to ask for a general sacrifice to pay for this effort. But that leads to a sense that we're not all involved, that we do not all owe the troops our support. More important, the war is about the Middle East. A long-term strategy to protect us from constant involvement in that region would include greater energy independence. A gas tax helps pay for our current struggle and helps us avoid future ones. Why not therefore a wartime gas tax of a dollar a gallon? If we do not owe it to our fellow citizens, to the environment, to greater fuel efficiency, can we at least owe it to the troops? Or is that minimal level of personal sacrifice too much to ask of ourselves?

Ramesh Ponnuru concurs in part, dissents in part, suggests that breaking OPEC would make more sense. But to break OPEC might involve turning the United States into a larger oil producer than it currently is. Tradeoffs everywhere...

RUNNING EXTRA: Skip at The Sports Economist notes,

A "wartime tax" is not the way to go. Wars are typically financed via deficits. This makes perfect sense, since wars are temporary, and temporary taxes distort decisions in inefficient ways. Bond finance minimizes the distortionary effects of financing temporary expenditures.

He also has some thoughts about requiring gas purchasers to pick up more of the costs of garrisoning the Middle East.

LOSING PATIENCE, FALLUJAH VERSION. Marine Lance Cpl. Ryan Christiansen sums up the likely fate of Saddam loyalists and assorted other reactionary elements in Fallujah:

"I really don't care; they're all gonna die."

Tim Blair picked up the report; it is indicative of a change in mindset in U.S. troops. Betsy's Page picks up the Associated Press coverage, in which the "May the fleas of a thousand camels ..." is recast.

At night, the psychological operations unit attached to the Marine battalion here sends out messages from a loudspeaker mounted on an armored Humvee. On Thursday night, the crew and its Arabic-language interpreter taunted fighters, saying, "May all the ambulances in Fallujah have enough fuel to pick up the bodies of the mujahadeen."

The message was specially timed for an attack moments later by an AC-130 gunship that pounded targets in the city.

Insults Unpunished follows the news, with links to several other articles.

Outside the Beltway observes that the change in attitude among the troops parallels that of police in rough neighborhoods; the post also suggests the "culturally sensitive" training troops received is wasted effort, if some of the reactionary elements don't really want to make the kinds of changes in their own lives that would make their own lives better.

Those reactionary elements will, as LCpl. Christiansen explains, meet their fates more quickly than the workplace slackers or the collegiate slackers.

LOSING PATIENCE, WORKPLACE VERSION. What fate awaits the collegiate slacker (who very well may have developed those bad habits in middle school.)

Good help hard to find for manufacturers

is the headline to a USA Today article by Barbara Hagenbaugh.

Manufacturers across the USA are having problems finding qualified employees, even though millions of factory workers lost jobs in recent years.

What is the first problem?

Larry Kensington, president of Kentwood, Mich.-based Bananza Air Management Systems, sifted through scores of résumés to hire three workers this year. One of his biggest gripes: Job applications riddled with spelling errors. "They can't even express themselves in a simple sentence," he says, noting employees need to be able to write so they can fill out quality-control data and other reports.

So much for "invented spelling" in the elementary schools, and the neglect of grammar and composition in favor of so-called critical theory in the higher grades. As Joanne Jacobs notes,

Statistical quality control is a big deal in manufacturing now. Employers want workers who can keep track of data, read technical information, write reports and communicate with each other about problems.

Good luck, there. The USA Today article offers this assessment of the quantitative abilities of many of these workers.

"It puts a high premium on basic numerical skills, it puts a high premium on the ability to learn and to take instruction, but it also puts a high premium on ... creativity," says Thomas Duesterberg, president of Manufacturers Alliance, an industry group.

So much for "invented math" and the end of a serious calculus requirement in college. By their fruits shall ye know them. So much, by the way, for the excuses.

Employers say it goes beyond skill, saying they are having problems with work ethics, which slipped during the economic boom of the late 1990s. That's as a surprise, considering nearly 3 million manufacturing jobs have been cut in the last four years.

Bob Confer of Confer Plastics in North Tonawanda, N.Y., says he has fired eight of the 18 people he has hired this year. They showed up late, didn't show up at all or didn't work hard — and those are the people he chose out of about 60 applications.

"Supposedly these guys are the cream of the crop," he says.

Kevin at Truck and Barter has some additional thoughts that are worth a look.

Could this possibly be true? A vast swath of the unemployed are simply unprepared to be employed?

It's implied that the even the top workers in the current pool of unemployed lack basic skills, have little work ethics, and just can't do the job required. But it's also possible that manufacturers are not paying high enough wages to attract the skilled unemployed. Perhaps in the labor market, as elsewhere, you get what you pay for.

Some manufacturers are having a hard time finding people who can write correctly and show up on time, while others want creativity in addition. These are two separate labor pools, and perhaps two separate problems.

Those 3 million competent former manufacturing workers are NOT just waiting around, begging to be hired. The labor market is tremendously dynamic, and it is very likely that most of those 3 million workers are in other manufacturing jobs, have jumped ship to the service industries, joint the military, started a business, have left the labor force, etc.. Are manufacturers putting enough effort in trying to steal former manufacturing employees away from the service industries they've entered?

Perhaps so. All the same, the possibility that some proportion of the work force is simply unprepared requires consideration.

LOSING PATIENCE, COLLEGIATE VERSION.

I love my students. Most are sincere, motivated, and assets to any classroom. I n fact two of them this semester have not registered on the Excuse-0-Meter once. That's significant because one was very pregnant, has given birth, not asked for any extensions and kept up with all the work so far. The other student is in a wheelchair, and prone to leg and kidney infections. If he misses something, he merely apologizes and we move on.

That's Beverly Carol Lucey, reporting on her collection of classic lame excuses. Her post pulls no punches on who is complicit in the Excuse Factory.

Complicit in the architecture of a college campus' intellectual machinations are professors who dole out "Incompletes" like lagniappes on top of the extra credit given for going to hear a speaker they fear will not garner a crowd, or to a job fair that would be for the student's own benefit anyway, or for showing up to class on a regular basis.

Amen.

PROGRESSIVE INTOLERANCE. A referendum that receives support from seven of ten voters is clearly illegitimate. Why? If it's a referendum in which University of Illinois students get to vote to keep their Chief, and the North Central cartel Accreditation folks object to the Chief, the university is in trouble. (Via Illini Girl.)

No mention of whether anyone has suggested that the vote is flawed, because there were only 13,000 votes cast from a potential voting population of approximately 30,000.

UNDERSTATEMENT OF THE DECADE. Interested Participant laments the closing of the Stetson Hat factory in St. Joseph, Missouri.

People are just not wearing hats like they used to.

Scuzzy looking ballcaps are another matter, I suppose.

DOESN'T ANYBODY AT THE NEW YORK TIMES RIDE THE SCOOTS? Evidently not. Live from the Third Rail comments on a test of some additional security measures at a passenger train station somewhere in the East. The Superintendent proposes the following amendment to their description.:

1. Take one train station in the entire nationwide interurban network, conveniently close to Homeland Security headquarters.

I would guess that the bad guys, unless they're really brazen, are going to attempt something where the Homeland Security folks are not, but I digress.

The New York Times has the story, complete with an entry for the corrections page.

Generally, no identification is needed to buy a ticket on a commuter train, and those trains carry more people in close proximity than Amtrak trains do, although unattended packages might be more obvious on a commuter train.

Not in my experience. Commuter trains are full of ... COMMUTERS ... schlepping backpacks, toting briefcases, possibly returning from Marshall Field (oh, that's right, Times reporters are as familiar with Marshall Field as they are with commuter trains ...) and placing said items in one-to-one correspondence with riders would be difficult, even with a spotter in each compartment. (For British readers, that's not the usage you're used to, but on center-entrance gallery coaches, a spotter at the A end of the car will not be able to see any packages in the B end.)

ON THE LIGHTER SIDE. Dunkin' Donuts sponsors a donut eating contest for policemen... An officer from Lake Geneva, Wisconsin, wins it.

PROFESSOR OF THE PRACTICE OF ECONOMICS? Tightly Wound likes the idea, which receives more explanation here.

EXPECT RIVET COUNTERS. Military reenactors do their modeling on a scale of 12 inches to the foot. The hobbyists get past those relatively minor differences with reenactors who do their modeling on the scale of 1/4" to the foot (I understand that there are others who swear by 3.5 mm to the foot as well as other scales.) Belle at Crooked Timber meditates on reenactment, and the comments section brings out the rivet counters.

(Superintendent's note: in model railroading, "rivet counter" is a pejorative reference to the modeler who objects to another modeler's work as being insuffiiciently detailed, or excessively free-lanced. It is probably a good thing that most members of university committees are not model railroaders. They'd probably set new standards for rivet-counting.)

TODAY'S MEME:

Input:

Pick up the nearest book.
Open it to page 23.
Find the fifth sentence.
Post the text of the sentence in your journal along with these instructions.

That would be Pilgrim: A Biography of William Brewster.

Finally, exhausted, she cancelled her attendance at a performance of Sophocle's Ajax.

The sentence concludes a description of a 1564 visit of Queen Elizabeth I to Cambridge University.

(Via Spitbull.)

WHEN SCIENCE AND FAITH COOPERATE. The Shroud of Turin has two sides, and researchers have until recentl looked at only one. Captain's Quarters has more.

QUOTE OF THE DAY:

In academia, left-liberalism is so entrenched its advocates' debating skills have gone rusty. When you've been talking to yourself for decades and imposing speech codes on everyone else, your ability to argue coherently - let alone entertainingly - inevitably wanes.

Andrew Sullivan suggests Air America fails because it's intellectually flabby.

SECOND SECTION: Scrapple Face puts Air America in perspective.

ADVANTAGE, COLD SPRING SHOPS? The University of Tennessee might have Insta Pundit (and Pat Summitt.) All the same, former Tennessee provost John Peters is staying at Northern Illinois University, for now.

“I think I demonstrated passion for NIU,” [Peters] said. After reflecting on the interview, he said he realized his feelings toward NIU. Even if he had been chosen as one of the six candidates, he’s not sure he would have continued with the search process, Peters said.

There is a lot that is good going on here, despite the best efforts of Springfield and the central administration to screw things up. There is a lot of work to be done, all the same.

Consider, for example, last night's spring football game. The Superintendent watched the first half, which is when all the scoring took place, and then watched this year's graduate string quartet (Azmari -- get thee a web page, ladies!) give an intense performance of two Beethoven quartets, the op.18 no. 1 and the op. 127.

It is gratifying to see almost as much student attendance at the spring game as there used to be at the regular season games, and some tenants of the nearby apartments decided to have balcony parties. All the same, the experience at Wisconsin, where a successful football program has become a candy store that remains on probation for a few more days, is not something that calls for an encore. Wisconsin's former chancellor, John Wiley, has the proper perspective.

Wiley also reprimanded athletic director Pat Richter and Bald for their failure to properly investigate the allegations. Both received letters of reprimand for their personnel files, and Richter's salary was frozen for one year.

Wiley praised Richter for his work to restore Wisconsin's athletic program to national prominence, including three Rose Bowl championships since 1994 and a trip to the Final Four for the men's basketball team in 2000. But he also noted this was the third time under Richter's watch that the university has committed a major rules infraction.

Now, about that Pat Summitt reference ... Once upon a time, the women's basketball program at Northern Illinois University led the country in scoring. Of late, despite four players elected to the All-Freshman team (including one Freshman of the Year) in five years, the program has had five losing seasons in six years, with no players recognized for academic achievement.

President Peters, sentiments will only get you so far. There is work to be done supporting the academic departments, and the Faustian bargains in intercollegiate athletics will not provide that support.

PEOPLE RESPOND TO INCENTIVES. Interesting reading in today's Northern Star. Above the fold is the headline, Police arrest 3 football players. Each player faces 11 charges of criminal damage to property, involving a tire-slashing spree early in April. Below the fold is a pay raise for the football coach, who received an extension of three years and a $60,000 per year increase, despite no evidence of any external offers from stronger programs.

Compare and contrast these articles with some stories from the Department of Economics, where the university administration did not see fit to make a sufficiently attractive offer to a colleague who received an offer from a slightly better-known economics program, and where the Northern Illinois graduate students can kick back without being tempted to slash tires afterwards.

HARBINGER OF SUMMER. Afternoon temperature hit 85 degrees, it was a good afternoon to take pencil, paper, and calculator to a coffee house with a view of the railroad tracks and work on a paper. The calculations came out properly, which will make the paper better, the iced mochas were quite good, and the railroad put eight trains through in 90 minutes, including two pairs of meets downtown (eastbounds picking up speed after their lunch stops, westbounds in Run 8 ...) It was a productive and enjoyable afternoon. Thanks for looking in, if you've been waiting for the free ice cream, there's some to come.

STILL WORKING ON THOSE TERM PAPERS. Back with some more substantive stuff Tuesday evening.

RUNNING EXTRA. Granted, the next set of posts doesn't show up until Friday. Thanks for your patience. It has been a productive week at the day job.

D'OH! "Weblogs are creating a whole new campus culture." Big Media are sometimes so slow on the uptake.

EVERYBODY'S A MUSIC CRITIC. Tyler at Marginal Revolution comments on the Ten Dirty Secrets of classical music. I'll concur with Professor Cowen in dissenting to points 2 and 8, and concur in part and dissent in part on British composers (Edward Elgar? Stick to daytime TV and high-school graduations, please.) I'll also add my own candidate: music written for purposes of getting tenure serves no other purpose. Flame away.

TONIGHT'S RAILROAD READING

Dean's World has the story.