Friday, February 5. 2010
From Phi Beta Cons:
My point is that the common notion that a college education is essential to doing most of the work in the economy is mistaken. The ability of individuals to do work seldom depends on anything they studied in college.
True indeed. Nothing wrong with a liberal arts education, though, as life-enrichment for those too lazy to figure out how to obtain it on their own. (It's called "reading.") A rigorous high school education ought to be enough for most practical purposes, and adequate preparation for any job training or apprenticeship which doesn't require advanced math or science.
The story of Germany's SDU is relevant to everyone these days, even though it sounds strange to hear people still talking about "workers" as they still do in Europe - as if it were some permanent condition of serfhood. One quote from the piece at Boston Review:
...social democracy may have settled the issues of industrial society, but it did so just in time for industrial society to give way to a globalized economy, one with its own complicated and pernicious effects on labor and social equality: immigration, fluctuating employment levels, and offshore outsourcing, to name a few.
Like the American Dems, political organizations like the SDU are fighting the last war.
I have never been disappointed in The Teaching Company, but I have never enjoyed a series as much as Prof. Sutherland's Classics of British Literature. It is college as it should be.
As with any excellent humanities prof, you learn as much about thinking about life as you do about the topic at hand. His soft brogue is pleasant too.
Today, I am listening to his Chaucer lectures. Time flies by on ye olde elliptical machine.
The American is the Englishman left to himself.
Alexis de Tocqueville, in a piece about de Tocqueville at Chicago Boyz
Several weeks ago I posted a longer version of this. The San Diego Union-Tribune liked it, and asked for a shorter version. 711 words from 1200+. Yes we can!
http://www.signonsandiego.com/news/2010/feb/05/no-gop-ideas-try-these-10/
What a putz. Can you image if Bush...
"Pleasing your enemies does not turn them into friends."
Who knows who first stated this ancient truism, but I snipped it from Kate.
Where not to die in 2010.
Also from Tax Prof: Law School Only Makes Economic Sense If You Go to a Top 70 School. Top 70? I'd say Top 25.
Fun in Hartford: NORTHEAST FISHING & HUNTING EXPO COMING FEB. 26-28
A bamboo bike?
How come no family members help this poor lady?
The wealthy don't pay the estate tax. Small businessmen, farmers,, and regular people are the ones who get stuck with it.
Rent control in NYC: Taxpayers, Meet Your New Tenants
Unpleasant Grannies rage against Tim Tebow's existence. Wonder whether they have grandkids...
Steyn: Credibility is what�s really melting
Tim Blair: Their faith upset by recent events, warmenists are lashing out.
Related: We have been swindled:
We've been set up as marks by a gang of opportunistic hucksters who have exploited the na�vely altruistic intentions of the environmental movement in an effort to control international energy consumption while redistributing global wealth and (in many cases) greedily lining their own pockets in the process.
Perhaps now, more people will finally understand what many have known for years: Man-made climate change was never really a problem -- but rather, a solution.
For just as the science of the IPCC has been exposed as fraudulent, so have its apparent motives. The true ones became strikingly evident when the negotiating text for the "last chance to save the planet" International Climate Accord [PDF], put forth in Copenhagen in December, was found to contain as many paragraphs outlining the payment of "climate debt" reparations by Western nations under the watchful eye of a U.N.-controlled global government as it did emission reduction schemes.
Then again, neither stratagem should come as any real surprise to those who've paid attention.
The EU is a tyrant. It is time for the Euroweenies to man up and rebel.
"I found it fascinating that the people who were editorializing against it were The New York Times Company and The Washington Post Company," Thomas said, according to a report in The New York Times. "These are corporations."
Thursday, February 4. 2010
Droll Yankees produces many good, squirrel-defeating bird feeders. They have the Whipper, the Dipper, the Flipper and the Tipper. I am trying the Tipper because it doesn't need batteries.
Yes, I always throw a few handfulls of seed on the ground each morning for the squirrels and the ground-feeders.
Obama’s Chicago enforcer Rahm Emanuel got lots of heat for calling my-way-or-the-highway liberals “f**king retards.” All the criticism was for him using the disparaging word “retards” and none for his frequent use of the adjective. Hmm? Via Instapundit, an Emanuel theme song. That’s the Chicago way, and mine from Brooklyn, and probably yours too.
The peaceable kingdom? Or already filled up with antelope meat? Daily Mail
 The O admin seems determined to quietly undo Clinton's welfare reforms. We have learned over the years that the Dems and the Lefties want all the people on the government plantation that they can collect. That's what "health care" is was all about, but the people saw through it.
It's what most Dem programs are about: everybody a slave to the Massas in Washington, and relying on their "generosity" (see Medicare).
Heather MacDonald now reports in Championing Dependency that New York is experiencing attacks on Clinton's welfare reform. Good essay. One quote:
This double-sided attack on New York’s welfare reform lacks all empirical basis. Since 1995, the city’s welfare rolls have dropped nearly 70 percent, from 1.1 million to 350,000. Rather than increasing, as opponents of welfare reform warned, the child poverty rate in New York City dropped 34 percent during the same period, compared with a 5 percent drop nationwide. In 2008, New York City had the lowest child poverty rate—26.5 percent—and the lowest total poverty rate—18.2 percent—of the country’s eight largest cities.
Work, even at minimum wage, remains the best route out of poverty. When tax credits and medical and housing benefits are included, an average single mother of two with an $8.25-an-hour job in New York City receives a $63,000 annual income. On welfare alone, that same mother would pull in $43,000 a year—a whopping amount for non-work, to be sure, but still less than work provides.
Re Ted Kennedy, via Never Yet Melted:
...Kennedy waxed sentimental about Washington in the early 1960s: “It used to be civilized. The media was on our side. We’d get our work done by one o’clock and by two we were at the White House chasing women. We got the job done, and the reporters focused on the issues. . . . It was civilized."
I visited Venice for a few days many years ago, and do not feel driven to return - it's a giant tourist trap with a pickpocket team on every block - except that I wouldn't mind catching the Venice Regatta in August:
On further thought, I wouldn't mind getting a little more experience with Venetian cooking. All I know about it is Risi e Bisi, which doesn't look like much but which is killer delicious when Mrs. BD makes it.
Here's When I Paint My Masterpiece live with The Band in 1971:
A new documentary, coming out in May. It's about applying to charter schools. Looks good.
The website of the producers has The Education Constitution.
Email from a friend:
One of our institutional equity market strategists reacted to Pres O's proposal to tax banks to recover TARP money. Everyone knows the the gov't is net ahead on its bank investments, but here are the actual returns (costs or benefits to taxpayers) as calculated by my colleague:
Bank bailouts: + 16.9 billion profit to date
AIG bailout: - $30.4 billion projected loss
Automaker bailout: - $30.5 billion projected loss
Homeowner bailouts: - $50 billion projected subsidy
Looks to me that the logic leads us to tax homeowners. Ooooooooops! I just realized that he is proposing that, too.
Who says there's nothing amusing in the newspapers anymore?
(From yesterday's MarketWatch)
 Justice Department seeking "retarded" or "mentally ill" lawyers.
Art as manifesto: The Bauhaus group
Our blog pal Mr. Free Market signs off. I guess his site has not been corporate enough. We shall miss him.
TREES WILL NOT BECOME UNSTOPPABLE KILLING MACHINES, ADMIT CLIMATE SCIENTISTS
College life: The Hamilton follies cont'd
Burlington VT: Our experiment in socialism
Kudlow vs. Schumer?
Blue Crab:
Longtime readers know that I have a brother with Down Syndrome.
My brother is considerably more decent, honorable, polite and has a better vocabulary than Mr. Emanuel.
By a very large margin.
Why does the US MSM ignore all of the climategates? Perhaps they do not wish to confuse us.
Powerline: Obama Attacks Churches, Charities and Home Values
Is the O's dishonesty harmful? Reason
Obama Budget Includes $4 Billion Bonanza for ACORN
Our friend Roger begins:
Last week, Howard Zinn, reigning anti-American historian of America, died of a heart attack. He was 87. Zinn’s gift to posterity was A People’s History of the United States, a book that has done more than any other textbook to instill hatred and contempt of America in the nation’s teachers and their students. No wonder it was such a runaway success. First published in 1980, it has gone on to sell some 2 million copies. And its brief against America was memorialized in “The People Speak” a 4-part mini-series that aired in December.
The outpouring of sentimental pap that Zinn’s passing occasioned was as large as it was nauseating. Typical was Bob Herbert’s emetic eulogy in The New York Times...
Americans do care about the "greater good." Right now, that means caring about the federal debt.
Wednesday, February 3. 2010
From Front Page's Class War in the Classroom:
“We must encourage students to access the antagonist class positions of texts in order to demonstrate how the oppositional voices contained in them identify evidence of class struggle,” Christopher Craig writes in the December 2009 issue of Radical Teacher, “a socialist, feminist and anti-racist journal on the theory and practice of teaching.” “Through this critical process, we can show how the values and interests of the dominant class are not universal but repressive, intended to keep the power relations between the ruling and working class one-sided.”
“For most of us, learning to read texts this way helps us to see through the ruling class ideology that exists in everything from literature to the nightly news.” Craig teaches at Emmanuel College, a Catholic institution of higher learning.
Wow. That's so cool, so advanced, and so deep. And no doubt it's exactly the lesson every $145,000 UAW worker wants his kids to be taught in school...
Thank God for teacher's ed. They do it all for the kiddies.
Rohmer died on Jan. 11. From a summary of Rohmer's movies:
Claire's knee—and the consternation it arouses in the diplomat—is a painstakingly constructed symbol of rationalisation gone amok. It gives us something by which to measure the diplomat's drift from reason. It also underlines the odd humour of the "Moral Tales": in Rohmer's world, faces are symmetrical, bodies proportional, and words are perfectly measured. Everyone is beautiful, and everything is in its right place. Everything, that is, except the intentions of his heroes.
The trailer for Claire's Knee (1970) - in French - sorry, but you can get the gist of it:
Thinking creatively about medical insurance. He says:
It was pretty crazy for Congress to decide under McCarran-Ferguson that the insurance business should be balkanized into 50 state markets.
Nowhere is the craziness more severe than in New England, where state insurance pools are tiny and health-insurance and health-care costs are the highest in the nation. Even a medium-sized state, say North Carolina (population 9.2 million), would largely escape this problem.
At Minding the Campus. One quote:
In his first and longest chapter, "The Problem of General Education," Menand takes us through the historical evolution of Columbia University's core curriculum, one that he and most fans of rigorous, highly structured general education take as America's finest model of the genre. But then he goes on to document how his own campus, Harvard, and most other elite universities disdain such a highly specified approach in favor of "distribution requirements" which leave the selection of general education content largely to the student. One senses that Menand favors (or at least approves of) a Columbia-style core curriculum but seems to be resigned to it being an anachronistic outlier: "the problem with general education is that it is perceived as an attempt to impose on general education a mission - call it 'preparation for life' - whose rationale liberal education has traditionally defined itself in opposition to. This is why ....liberal arts faculty want to own general education and to have little to do with it at the same time."
It would apppear that it is from bone fire, a burning of human bones.
At City Journal. One quote:
There remains, however, an astonishingly gaping absence in Galbraith’s worldview. While he is perfectly able to see the defects of businessmen—their inclination to megalomania, greed, hypocrisy, and special pleading—he is quite unable to see the same traits in government bureaucrats. It is as if he has read, and taken to heart, the work of Sinclair Lewis, but never even skimmed the work of Kafka.
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