Sinners in the Hands of an Angry Blog

So, my brother-in-law applied to the Department of Defense and State.  Since he speaks Chinese and Russian (as well as a few others) I figured he’d be a shoo-in for both.  Defense accepted him, but State did not — and why?  Apparently he scored too low on the memo-writing portion — in which he had to craft a memo outlining his response to a petty spat between junior State personnel.  Hilariously, his language fluency (despite having a number of what State calls “high priority language skills”) was not able to be considered — that would only matter if he got to a later part of the process.  So, he’s probably going to Defense — which he concludes will probably be best in the long run, as various sources have warned him that he probably wouldn’t like the politics at State.  Which is why they demand such high memo-writing skill, I suppose.

Now, perhaps if State employees all had such amazing command of foreign languages that they could afford to be picky about which applicants also had good memo-writing skills, I’d understand.  But, uh, yeah — not so much:

Substandard skills were found in people holding 31 percent of the approximately 3,600 jobs that require a certain level of language proficiency, known as language-designated positions, up from 29 percent in 2005. In critically important regions such as the Near East and South and Central Asia, that number rises to 40 percent.

[...]

Deficiencies in what GAO calls “supercritical” languages, such as Arabic and Chinese, were 39 percent.

Gosh, if only a qualified Chinese-speaking applicant had recently applied.  Oh, right.  What really confuses me is the priority — language skills are only examined after meeting a certain set of criteria.  It seems like if you ever use the term “supercritical” to describe a certain skill that your employees might have, you might maybe want to put that on your front line of requirements for applicants.  Now the GAO report doesn’t say — but maybe “memo-writing” is” super-duper-critical!”

The best sign to me about the economic crisis was that most everyone agreed that we shouldn’t respond to it with crazy protectionism or trade wars. Let’s not blow that reputation:

HONG KONG — Just two days after the United States slapped Chinese tire imports with hefty tariffs, Beijing has hit back by saying it would launch an anti-dumping investigation into automobile and chicken products from the U.S.

China’s Commerce ministry said Sunday that the probe was in response to complaints from local manufacturers that claim some products from the U.S. have an unfair advantage. At the same time, Beijing condemned protectionist policies adopted elsewhere.

The “protectionist” policy that seems to have triggered the Chinese tit-for-tat investigation was an order signed on Friday by President Barack Obama that imposes a 35% tariff on tires imported from China on top of the existing import duty of 4%.

Very bad.  Look, Mr. Obama, no amount of talking about financial regulation or health care reform having great economic benefits will matter if you do this stuff.  No one is going to take you seriously as someone trying to help the global economy recover if you enact tariffs like this.  Ludicrously, it is in the exact industry that we just spent billions (cash-for-clunkers) trying to make the product cheaper — and now we enact a tariff making tires (which, attentive readers may note, are an ingredient in many cars) more expensive.

At the risk of sounding apocalyptic, it’s a staple of even our miserable high school history education that the high protectionist tariffs enacted during/before the Great Depression made things a lot worse.  Is it really a revelation to our President? This is junior league stuff.