Do US military officers need college degrees?

Op Ed piece in today's Wall St Journal.  Probably not, the author says.  Mostly because a 2015 college degree isn't worth much he says.  He goes on to reccomend promoting successful enlisted men to officer rank.
   I did ROTC in college and then put in six years on active duty in USAF.  In those days we had a fair number of "mustang" officers, guys who started out as enlisted men and then went thru OCS and got commissioned.   It was generally accepted that a mustang officer was as good as any and better than most, and we needed more of them.  
  Of course, after achieving a commission, the mustangs mostly started working on a college degree via correspondence courses and night school.  The WSJ writer may have his doubts about the need for a college degree, but the mustang officers had no such doubts.
   The real and effective leadership of the troops came from the non-commissioned officers, the sergeants.  These men were all senior enlisted men, who had decided they liked the service, and after re enlisting, they had the experience gained on their first hitch, they knew their jobs, and knew the mission better than anyone else on base.  As a company grade officer,  I had to win the confidence of the unit NCO's to get any thing done.  This was not unduly difficult, the NCO's were always overjoyed to find a company grade officer who they could trust, and who would go to bat for them in hassles with other base organizations, (supply, base civil engineering, personnel, maintenance control, etc).   Success as a company grade officer was largely based on interpersonal skills.  In my case I drew more heavily upon things learned at Quaker prep school than upon things learned at college.  The benefit of doing college before going in the service was simply that as a 22 year old college graduate I was more effective than I had been as an 18 year old high school graduate. 

Alternate Energy hikes my electric bill

I'm talking wind and solar here.  Solar stops every day when the sun goes down.  Wind stops when the wind stops blowing, something that happens a lot around here.  Both solar and wind only work when the utilities are forced by law to pay the producers top rates for any juice they may generate, when the sun is up or the wind is blowing.  When the sun goes down, or the wind stops blowing, the utility has to have enough real power plants to carry the entire electrical load on their system.
   The major cost to the utility is paying off the bonds used to build the power plant in the first place.  Consider a new nuclear plant.  Those cost about $6 billion to construct.  The utility has to float $6 billion in 20 year bonds.  Suppose the interest rate is 6%.  That means the utility has to make $480 million a year debt service payments on their shiny new plant.  That's a lot of money.  And they have to make debt payments whether to plant is running or not. 
   A plant like that will produce a gigawatt of electricity, which can be sold for 8 cents a kilowatt hour.  Which works out to $ 700,800,000 a year income.   So, assuming the plant runs 24/7,  and debt service is paid, the plant owners have only $220,800,000 per year to pay all other costs, labor, maintenance, fuel rod changes, compliance with government paperwork, everything.  In short, the debt service is the major cost of producing electricity.  And debt service has to be paid whether the plant is running or not.  Harry Homeowner's generation may save a little fuel, but that's chicken feed compared to the debt service.
   So when Harry Homeowner puts his solar cells on the grid, and gets paid top dollar by the utility, he doesn't save the utility any money.  He doesn't reduce the major cost, debt service by so much as a nickel.  In fact, he costs the utility.  Which raises my electric bill.  Which is too damn high already.  Which is why New Hampshire has a cap on the number of home alternate energy "net metering" permits allowed.
  NHPR was on this the other morning.  Most of the net metering permits have been issued.  Which means new alternate energy installations won't get paid by the utility.  Which means they are pure money losers to Harry Homeowner.  So the alternate energy companies are lobbying the legislature to raise the net metering cap.  Do that enough and you can drive more industry out of the state. 

Chris Christy vs Rand Paul

They got into a shouting match on the Thursday night TV debate over cell phone surveillance.   Rand Paul insisted that investigators need to get a court issued search warrant before the telephone company would turn over  phone records.  Christy wants to continue current practice by which NSA scarfs up all the phone records of every one and keeps them for ever.  Christy claimed the current system is crucial for security. 
   On this issue I find myself siding with Rand Paul, even though I have serious reservations about a lot of things Paul says.  When I think of a future Lois Lerner going over my telephone records, identifying those I called, and scheduling them for IRS audits, I get very scared.  I am an extremely low level Republican party official, I serve on a town committee in a small town, which is as close to the bottom as you can get.  That future Lois Lerner would have to be out of her head to bother about me and my friends, 'cause we are too small to be worth it, especially when there are bigger and more important targets to be hit.  Like my US rep, my senator, my governor. 
  But, I don't like the idea of democrats getting access to phone records.  They could easily find and harass every Republican in the state.  They may say that NSA would never let the democrats into the phone records.  And you can believe as much of that as you like.  I would feel a lot safer if the phone records were not kept on everyone.
   Investigators ought to go before a judge, a real judge not that rubber stamp  Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISA), and show a real cause to snoop the phone records.  If the judge goes along with the investigators, he issues a search warrant, the investigators take the warrant to the phone company, and the phone company causes its computer to print out the suspects phone records.  We stop the NSA bulk collection of every phone call made in the USA (and over most of the world as well)  This matter is currently before the courts, lower courts have ruled one way, appeals courts have ruled the other way, and the matter has yet to make it to the Supremes. 

Good Show

I watched it.  Started at 5 with the lower tier.  They done good.  Watched the varsity at 9.  They done good.  The Fox crew had good questions, did followup, and were a helova lot more professional than the major network newsies were last time.  Give Fox one attaboy. 
   They opened the major event asking everyone if they would support the party nominee and not go third party.   The Donald said no.  That drew boos from the audience.  Upon cross examination, The Donald stood by his words.  That might have been the biggest bombshell of the night.  And it forbodes trouble in the general election.  There is a good chance The Donald won't get the nomination.  If he runs as a third party it will most likely tip the election to the democrats.  That's what third party runs have done in the past, starting with Teddy Roosevelt's Bull Moose effort that put Woodrow Wilson into the White House.
    Carly Fiorina, although relegated to the minor league, really really looked and sounded good.  She had a doozy of a zinger for The Donald.  She speaks well, speaks of substance rather than vagueness, comes across as sharp, balanced, and fair.   

Foreign Policy experience, or lack theref

You hear it every day.  "So and so has not foreign policy experience."  This slam is most often leveled at domestic politicians, governors say, as a way of saying "He can't be a good president".    Usually it's a newsie using this slam on a Republican. 
   Actually, a president of the US can call upon every experienced person in the entire country to be in his cabinet, give him advice, or join his administration.  Eisenhower had John Foster Dulles for secretary of state, Nixon had Henry Kissinger.  Truman had John Marshall.  George W. Bush had Colin Powell.  FDR had Cordell Hull.
   First of all, foreign policy is very similar to domestic politics.  Deal cutting, figuring out what they really want, and what they might settle for.  Assessing foreign leaders, is this guy trustworthy or will he stab me in the back just for grins?  These considerations are the same for domestic politics as for foreign relations.  Anyone with the political skills to get elected president will be pretty sound on this sort of thing. 
   The real question:  Does this presidential candidate have the necessary people skills to pick good cabinet officers and advisers?  Can this candidate tell the Henry Kissingers (who knew what he was doing) from the John Kerrys (who really doesn't know what he is doing). Does the presidential candidate have the managerial savvy to avoid micromanaging everything, and get out of the way and let the secretary of state and/or the national security adviser do his job without being nitpicked to death?
   So, when I hear a newsie (democrat with byline) slamming a Republican for lack of foreign policy experience  (or any other kind of experience) I don't take him seriously

Pageview spikes

Every so often I look at the page view counts (traffic counts or hits) on this blog.  Naturally I get a good warm feeling as traffic increases over time.   Right now I get maybe 70 hits on an ordinary day.  Then there are extraordinary days where I get a spike of 250 hits, all in a short period of time.  I'm guessing that the spikes are not real readers, but computer programs sampling my blog perhaps to index my posts into search engines or perhaps some unknown reason. 

WaPo declares colesterol OK to eat

Attention grabbing headline in WaPo, seen on the internet.   Sounds good to me, I like my fried eggs and bacon same as anybody else.  Fairly long article.  But, they don't describe any evidence in favor of their brand new view on diet.  I expect claims like this to came from patient studies or biochemical experiments or statistical work or something.  Some numbers would be nice.  The lengthy WaPo article fails to offer any solid evidence for their position.  They quote a lot of people saying it is so, but nothing to back the sayers up.  Opinions are fine, everyone has one, but opinions ain't science. 
   Does this lack of science in the article reflect the real world (like there is no evidence) or does it reflect the ignorance of WaPo reporters?