Well, it was a nice idea…

…but it seems like the notion of a summer gathering of IBers in Colorado is impractical and uninspiring. So I’ll stand down from alert. Anybody who wants to come out to hang with The Hostage on the weekend of July 12 is certainly welcome to do so.

Better brush off my resume

So that I can lay down some conservatism on the benighted liberals at the University of Colorado:

Chancellor G.P. “Bud” Peterson surveys this landscape (the liberal landscape of CU) with unease. A college that champions diversity, he believes, must think beyond courses in gay literature, Chicano studies and feminist theory. “We should also talk about intellectual diversity,” he says. So over the next year, Mr. Peterson plans to raise $9 million to create an endowed chair for what is thought to be the nation’s first Professor of Conservative Thought and Policy.
…
Mr. Peterson — a Republican who took over as chancellor two years ago — says he would like to bring a new luminary to campus every year or two to fill the chair, for an annual salary of about $200,000. No candidates have been approached, but faculty and administrators have floated big names like Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, columnist George Will and Philip Zelikow, who chaired the 9/11 Commission.

OK, OK. So maybe I don’t have enough lumens to be a “luminary.” But I could certainly turn this little moppet around:

“They need to learn about social problems and poverty and the type of things liberal professors are likely to talk about,” says Ms. Malouff, a Democrat.

There speaks a child who’s never met a conservative thought in her entire life.

The silver lining of rising wheat costs

The opium crops in Afghanistan have been a problem area since well before the invasion. Since the invasion, the UN has been reluctant to crack down on opium growers, since it is their only livelihood, and is a key part of the economy. The downside, beyond the drug aspect, is that the opium passes from the farmers to local warlords or the Taliban, who sell it to raise funds.

But there’s some hope that the situation is changing organically:

Afghan farmers hope to capitalise on soaring food costs by growing wheat instead of poppy crops, with the fall in heroin prices further fuelling the switch.

The price of a tonne of wheat in Afghanistan has almost trebled this year, causing acute food shortages. A changeover of crops has begun in key agricultural regions, said Tekeste Tekie, country representative for the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organisation.

He said a significant increase in wheat crops is expected from next year’s harvest. “The high price of commodities has encouraged farmers to switch from poppy cultivation to wheat. In fact, we are already seeing evidence of this happening, for instance in the Bamian region, where some farmers have planted half wheat and half poppy crops,” Tekie said.

The growing season runs from November to June in Afghanistan. If wheat prices stay near their current level, supported by regional subsidies, an Afghan farmer can make up to a third more on wheat than poppy by next year’s harvest, according to figures from the Ministry of Agriculture.

I just hope that the transition doesn’t drive the price of poppies up.

A clarion call to counter China

A wakeup call and call to arms in the Wall Street Journal:

…we cannot lose sight of the fact that every day China is growing stronger. The rate and nature of its economic expansion, the character and patriotism of its youth, and its military and technical development present the United States with two essential challenges that we have failed to meet, even though they play to our traditional advantages.

The first of these challenges is economic, the second military. … We may think we have troubles now, but imagine what they will be like were we to face an equal.
…
As we content ourselves with the fallacy that never again shall we have to fight large, technological opponents, China is transforming its forces into a full-spectrum military capable of major operations and remote power projection. Eventually the twain shall meet.

He points out that our military budget and resources have declined over the past few decades, while China has been modernizing with deliberate haste. I doubt we’ll be able to reverse those trends, but it’d be nice if we could postpone our descent into 2nd-tier nationhood for a few more decades.