Further Proof That Old People Don't Get It

From a Times article about the new Rocky movie, "Rocky Balboa":

“It’s a high-technology, Google-blogging, iMac-type of premise going on there mixed with the classic underdog versus the establishment,” offered Mr. Sealey ["a former film executive who is now a professor of marketing at University of California, Berkeley"].

Does this guy have any idea what he is talking about? Couldn't he have at least thrown in a reference to My Space or Facebook, so that this cliche would be fully prepped for bed. Maybe it's his film background, where if you throw enough buzz words into a sentence that somehow makes it a valid, cogent thought. Or maybe he is just a clueless idiot, and UC Berekely really needs to reconsider their hiring policies.

When the news leaves you with more questions than aswers...

Quote of the day: "The Army is 'transitioning from an endeavor that has been less than a high priority to one that is of the highest priority,' said Jack Keane, a retired four-star general who served as the Army vice chief of staff during the first months of the war. 'And it is long overdue.'"

Seriously? 3.5 years in and we are just now making the effective training of Iraqi forces the highest priority. Turns out our embedded advisors are only now receiving any sort of formal training, and the training their getting now probably isn't good enough. Read the whole article but it's pretty clear that our efforts to date have been pretty lackluster. The highlights:

- We only have 4000 advisors on the ground, which works out to 11 for every 700 Iraqis. Later in the article there is acknowledgement by the Army that the ratio is too low, but that leaves the question of what a meaningful level is, and how quickly they can get to it.

- None of them have any formal language instruction. We've fortunately rectified that, and the guys now going through the official "advisor school" get a meager 50 hours. But I suppose this falls into the something is better than nothing school of thought.

Particularly frustrating about this article (and most pieces of what passes for journalism these days) is the complete lack of context, both historical and military, provided by the writer. For example, there is no comparison of the actual results of advisor training to the previous claims of the Administration.

More importantly, there's no sense of how many advisors we need to achieve the goals that the military has set for them. How many more do we need - is it 1,000 or 10,000? What is the current rate of training. It's a two-month program, so that suggests some pretty tight limitations on the number of highly-qualified advisors we can add to the existing pool. And at a very fundamental level, what is the evidence that the advisors who are in the field are actually making tangible progress - that the Iraqi forces they are working with perform better than their unadvised counterparts.

Michael Gordon knows his stuff [I'm currently reading Cobra II] but this article is just lacking.

Other cutely buried items:

"...complaints that earlier efforts to train American advisers had been handicapped by bureaucratic inertia..."
- Read: Rumsfeld didn't care. No one above him cared. The program languished.

"It remains far from clear whether increasing the number and caliber of American advisers can provide enough of the security gains the United States is seeking."
- Hello? This is from the 7th paragraph. I had to read the article twice to spot this. Isn't the essence of what we should be asking [See my fundamental question from above.].

Tick Tock. Tick Tock.

Anyone who know me, knows I'm pretty bearish about the prospects for the U.S. economy in particular, and the world economy as a whole. I've been fairly convinced that economic growth in the US over the past 3-4 years has been pretty illusory, that it was only a matter of time before we saw a pretty serious correction. It's beginning to look as though the markets are taking the same view. See this article in the Times on the continued weakness of the US dollar. Or this article in the Journal [subscription req.]. The key takeaway is this:

"...the American economy will continue to weaken as economies in Europe and Asia grow stronger."

Next week we will get a pretty good picture [WSJ subscription req.] of where the American economy stands as a number of important reports dealing with housing, consumer spending, and inflation all come out. According to the article it's unlikely that all the reports point in the same direction, but who really knows.