We are a commune of inquiring, skeptical, politically centrist, capitalist, anglophile, traditionalist New England Yankee humans, humanoids, and animals with many interests beyond and above politics. Each of us has had a high-school education (or GED), but all had ADD so didn't pay attention very well, especially the dogs. Each one of us does "try my best to be just like I am," and none of us enjoys working for others, including for Maggie, from whom we receive neither a nickel nor a dime. Freedom from nags, cranks, government, do-gooders, control-freaks and idiots is all that we ask for.
Why is a college degree diminishing in its economic and social value?
Because so many people are going, nowadays. It's not special anymore, and unselected people are getting degrees today who could not have gotten near higher ed one generation ago. It's a consumer-oriented biz now, desperate for gullible consumers. From our IBD link this morning:
A recent example of this exaggerated view of the value of higher education is "The Undereducated American," a paper by Anthony Carnevale and Stephen Rose of the Georgetown Center on Education and the Workforce.
The authors argue that the United States needs to produce far more college graduates than it currently does.
Their evidence is that there is a significant wage "premium" for those who graduate from college — across all fields of work. They argue, in effect, that the high return on investment applies regardless of whether the graduate becomes a financier or a dishwasher.
But they fail to look at generational differences.
Recent data from the U.S. Census Bureau reveal that gains for recent college graduates have been declining for more than 10 years.
Let the dead French theorists lie. Instead, literary scholars can become guides to the physical reality of the past. If you think about it, that's what we've been doing in class for the last hundred years: explaining how to pronounce "Doth not Brutus bootless kneel?" in Early Modern English, for instance, or describing a Boeing B-17 to help students understand Randall Jarrell's poem "The Death of the Ball Turret Gunner." Once ordinary people note that we're doing something useful again, they might stop looking at us like we're nuts. And maybe we'll even get some jobs back.
Are the kids so uninformed that they don't know who a ball turret gunner is? Wish I had time now to discuss this essay, but I don't.
The old FDR way of offering progressive government as the antidote to free market recklessness no longer works. It no longer comforts anyone or makes them feel secure. There is a long history of government recklessness that makes it impossible for more than a limited portion of the population to be that naive again.
The public is more accepting of government intervention today than it was then, but it is also more distrustful of it. And that distrust easily comes to the surface in a time of crisis which is why the movement to hold government accountable is gathering steam.
The Great Depression paved the way for a change in the relationship between the public and the government. And the Ought Depression may be doing the same thing. But while the New Deal made it a close relationship, the political wars of the last two years are leading instead to a breakup between the public and the government.
Progressive government has not only failed to avert several economic crises, it has also completely mismanaged the social safety net and become so hideously expensive that it can no longer be kept up. Those are all dangerously compelling answers and the left has come up with no response to them except to throw out conspiracy theories and cry racism. Such intellectual desperation reminiscent of a dictator ranting hysterically on a televised broadcast as the noose tightens around his regime.
"The loss of transcendence evokes the flight to utopia. I am convinced that the destruction of transcendence is the actual amputation of human beings from which all other sicknesses flow. Robbed of their real greatness they can only find escape in illusory hopes."
The prospects for Irene in the northeast change by the hour. Last night, she was downgraded but now it's just confusing. However, if she does hit New England hard, don't be surprised if Maggie's is down for a while. As of now, predictions are just "rain and wind" on Sunday, warm and sunny Monday. (That's obviously an old toon from the files)
Pull in your lawn chairs and stuff. Prepare for loss of power. Beer, charcoal, batteries, beer, candles, booze, gas, beer, etc.
Bungee cords. Forceps. A large sheet of vinyl. Thirty feet of 1/2" clear tubing. A dead rabbit, two pairs of black pantyhose, a quart of corn oil, a large pumpkin, and a fully charged cordless drill with a size-variety of wood boring bits.
You will need these things. Survival is the word. And, undetectable perversion in early natural darkness. Those are also. Some words.
Business Regulation vs. Growth: The View from Middle America - It has become clear that the Sarbanes-Oxley Act has been a real deterrent to companies that would like to go public.
Zuckerman: Obama and the 'Competency Crisis' - Like many Americans who supported him, I long for a triple-A president to run a triple-A country.
Excuse me, Mort, but a prez does not "run a country" - not in the USA anyway. And your "longing" is immature.
There’s a major difference, though, between New York and the country as a whole. The New York option—move somewhere else—doesn’t apply to private-sector middle-class workers fighting adverse conditions that exist throughout America. So they’ve exercised the classic democratic right of political action, organizing themselves to compete in elections. The Tea Party is the national voice of the private-sector middle class—despite the demonizations heaped upon it by public-policy elites whose own judgment and competence leave much to be desired.
I doubt that the world "needs" more people, but I do think it needs more millionaires and billionaires because they buy stuff and invest in new enterprises.
Texas governor Rick Perry is the front-runner for the Republican presidential nomination now, at least in the national polls. Undoubtedly that’s the main reason so many East Coast pundits and Beltway wags are making fun of him. He likes guns! He’s from Texas! He talks funny! He’s a — gird yourself now — Christian! New York magazine and others mock his harmless, Bush-like pronunciation of nuclear (“nuke-ular”). They’re scandalized that he doesn’t go to a golf course to relax, but a shooting range. It’s already a cliché among liberals to describe him as the sort of cartoonish, ignorant cowboy ...
I can say for certain that I would reconsider any sailing plans around the Outer Banks, the Chesapeake, New Jersey or southern New England this weekend. I remember being on Martha's Vineyard a day after Hurricane Bob. Big waves. They were already selling "I Got Blown By Bob" t-shirts. Let no hurricane go to waste.
Somewhere, somebody is already printing tees with "I Got Blown By Irene" - just in case they do.
Irene seems to be weakening, to Brendan's ill-concealed disappointment.
I say that it can be either, both, or neither. If one grows up in a drug- and crime-tolerant environment, it's more likely that the wicked side of one's nature will be given free rein and things won't work out well, just as it's easier to live like a Boy Scout when all around you are doing the same.
My problem with addressing the subject this way, however, is that it ignores the large numbers of voluntarily poor, unluckily poor, and temporarily poor. Poverty is not a unitary phenomenon. Is a struggling artist or actor "poor"? And what is poverty in America anyway?
I think that French may be speaking more about "the poor in spirit" than the materially-deprived.
I can also attest to the fact that an Ivy League education isn’t all that it is cracked up to be. Whatever small accomplishments I have in life are not easily traceable to my academic achievements (even though I was considerably closer to Clinton than Gore in class ranking). Arguably, the most successful president of the post-war period, Ronald Reagan, attended the ultra-obscure Eureka College. I don’t know what his grades were and I don’t much care. All I know is he got Gorbachev to “tear down that wall.” (Not exactly, but you know what I mean.)
Turning to Perry, he was a mediocre student at Texas A & M, a school that emphasizes a more practical form of education than Yale. What does this mean? Don’t know, but these days going to an Ivy no longer appears to be the royal road to career success it once was. This study of Top 10 Job Placement Colleges only shows one Ivy, Cornell, in the tenth position. Number one, not surprisingly, is The University of Texas at Austin.
Perhaps more importantly… and amusingly… this study from the Wall Street Journal shows Perry’s Texas A & M the number two choice of corporate job recruiters with nary an Ivy in sight until Cornell (again) at fourteen. Harvard, Princeton and Yale did not make the top twenty-five.
Lewis’s aversion to government was clearly revealed in 1951 when Winston Churchill, within weeks after he regained office as prime minister of Great Britain, wrote to Lewis offering to have him knighted as “Commander of the Order of the British Empire.”Lewis flatly declined the honor because he, unlike the “progressives,” was never interested in politics and was deeply skeptical of government power and politicians, as expressed in the first two lines of his poem “Lines during a General Election”: “Their threats are terrible enough, but we could bear / All that; it is their promises that bring despair.”
From our archives, because the sound of saws may be constant around here this weekend, if Irene hits us in Yankeeland:
Burning carbon to kill trees! Good work and good fun.
The gasoline-powered chainsaw is one of the finest inventions since the wheel and the plow. It's really just a mechanized stone axe like my Indian sncestors used, and I am eagerly awaiting the laser saw to bring wood cutting into the 21st Century.
While the engineering principles of the chainsaw may go back to surgical instruments of the 1800s, the modern concept dates to the 1920's with bulky and impractical designs until the German engineer Andreas Stihl developed his "tree-cutting machine" around 1929. The one-man saw dates to around 1950 and was perfected by Stihl and their main competitor, the weapons manufacturer Husqvarna. The Stihl family still owns their company. Check out their saws here. (No, this is not an advt.)
I have always enjoyed power saws: my godfather's father started the Wright Saw Company in CT, which produces a reciprocating power saw - an anomaly in the development of power saws which never really caught on except for special uses.
Of course, the famous and indispensible Sawzall is a reciprocating saw.
Here's the interesting weather we have to look forward to, up here. Think I'll go get some gas for my Stihl Farm Boss.
599 Chequessett Neck Rd Wellfleet, MA. 3bd. 2fb. Single Family, asking $1,900,000. I know the site all too well. This place is on half of the lot we wanted to buy, years ago, for $125,000 and felt we could not afford it. Turned out we could have, and should have. I'd be rich now, at least on paper.
Details and pics here. It's right down the road from Aunt Sukie's. Much as I love that area, I'd rather have a place on Lieutenant Island.
It must be late summer, and I have hunting on my mind.
This is my muddy-legged huntin' Standard Poodle, gazing out the cabin door after a long day in the woods and bogs a few years ago. Don't laugh: he points hard, and retrieves. Bred from a line of hunting Standards, and my second from that line. Used to hunt pretty close, but lately ranges too far yet will loop 20 yards left or right on command. Will chase a damn deer in a swamp forever, dang it. That's what whistles and shock collars were made for. He's been good with whistle commands, but I haven't practiced with him lately. Also known to point on mice. Love the guy despite imperfections, and well-aware that any dog's imperfections in training are really the master's laziness.
"Find the bird." He will do that with the greatest of pleasure, but it might very well be out of range if he puts the bird up or points on it. Loves the job, loves the hunt. Like most field dogs, cannot understand how any human can miss a bird. "No bird, no bird." They look at you like you're an idiot. You are supposed to be God.
I cannot clean a shotgun with him in the room. He goes berserko with excitement. All hunting dogs know the difference between hunting gear and ordinary outdoor stuff.
There is no work-out like a few days over hill and dale and busting brush in Maine near the Quebec border, pursuing the Ruffed Grouse (they call it pa'tridge up there - or "chicken") and Woodcock. Gosh, I just love it, even though you occasionally annoy a cranky moose.
Low grading standards in university education departments are part of a larger culture of low standards for educators, and they precede the low evaluation standards by which teachers are judged in K-12 schools. The culture of low standards for educators is problematic because it creates a disconnect between teachers' perceptions of acceptable performance and the perceptions of everyone else.
It's difficult for me to form a strong opinion on the grading topic because I have no idea what Education Majors learn or study. Maybe it's so easy and simple that anybody can master it readily, and all deserve As. Maybe they have full-semester courses in making Lesson Plans, and full-semester courses in Social Justice. Beats me.
However, it does not escape me that no profs in higher ed have ever taken a teaching course (outside of those profs in the Education Dept.). Furthermore, to the best of my knowledge,not one of my kids was ever taught by anybody with an education degree.
(A reader asked the question. Yes, very expensive private schools. Private education is the only way to not be taught by people with ed degrees, if such things matter to you. Most of my kids' teachers had done a lot in life before they decided to follow their hearts and teach. Their Latin teacher was a professional actor on the side, their math teacher a retired Wall Streeter, their English teacher a retired Sports Illustrated writer, etc.)
I think it would be constructive to abolish the entire notion of the Education Major. Let people who feel called to K-12 teaching study something like everybody else does and, if they want to take some courses on the side on primary school education or Special Ed or whatever, OK. It seems to me that most teachers ultimately learn their trade by being assistant teachers - by apprenticeship and supervision, not in education departments.
Teaching is not hard work, if you know your topic. I've done it. It's fun (but some kids can't learn and some don't want to. Many are not interested in anything academic.). In fact, every parent becomes an amateur teacher. Much more primary education is ultimately home schooling than schools might want to admit. (In my state of CT, the "quality" of the schools across towns correlates exactly with the levels of average education and income of the adults in the town - regardless of teacher pay etc - suggesting to me that it is, in part, education-minded parents who make their schools look good.)
Irene might be headed to New England. No problem - we can deal with it. It's always a smaller deal than they make it sound. I call it "Weather Porn." And if Yankees can't deal with bad weather, who can? Heck, we enjoy bad weather.
Muslim immigrants to America seem to get with the program - that's why they came. I wonder why they form dangerous and socially-hostile ghettoes in Europe. Might it be because they are given too much? The workers in my Dunkin Donuts used to be all Hispanic women - now it's half Hispanic women and half Muslim men.
What an absurdity. Had Obama not shattered investor and employer confidence with massive intervention after massive intervention in the markets, had he practiced any fiscal discipline or simply not imposed the enormous burdens of Obamacare on employers, then the country would not be struggling to get unemployment under 9%. If he just called off the NLRB there would be more jobs in South Carolina, and that is one of thousands of destructive regulatory decisions, perhaps tens of thousands of such decisions.
I have grown fond of Psychiatrist-blogger 1 Boring Old Man. I generally agree with him on things, and I respect his efforts to be more up to date on the latest things than I am. From one of his Awakening Thoughts:
My real complaint about modern psychiatry, besides the corrupting influence of industries of various flavors, is that it lacks the tension and curiosity about things unknown that drives medicine forward. For all the talk of neuroscience, what I mostly see in our literature is "product testing" and the application of any new technology of science that comes along to conditions without creative ideas and hypotheses driving the endeavor. I don’t know why people have Schizophrenia, and I want to know about that. There are thousands of similar questions, and not all of them have to do with neuroscience. I’m sure that people get depressed, have bad anxiety, or behave destructively because of things in their minds, or biographies, or lives – not in their brains. That seems self-evident to me. And I’m tired of having those of us who are interested in that causality discounted as kooks based on complaints about the early theories of Freud or the arrogance of our predecessors.
My profession is currently schizophrenic (in the non-clinical sense).
I think one of the things that defines our website, Maggie's Farm, is curiosity. Curiosity about almost everything. We are only adequate writers; we lack creative flair and a zippy way with language; we rarely present entirely new ideas about things (but sometimes we do); we are dilettantes in most areas we discuss.
Curiosity is us. We like to wonder what is inside things.
As I sit by the pool this lovely Connecticut afternoon sipping a Scotch and enjoying a decent ceegar after having done a mile in the pool nude nekked with only God and the wife's horses watching me, I have been reading this in American Scientist: That’s Interesting - Curiosity drives discovery. But what, exactly, makes us curious? One quote:
Faced with a puzzle, and excited by it, I do try to understand the anomaly before me. My failure to find a ready explanation, and my feeling that the phenomenon is nonetheless understandable—these are both motivating psychological actions. In time, if I am fortunate, my thinking brings me to an explanation that makes sense not only to me, but to the community of chemists. I wouldn’t have gotten there without thinking, “That molecule is really interesting.”
Three things drive learning: curiosity, ambition for mastery, and necessity. Curiosity is an underrated and relatively rare gift. We try to nurture it in ourselves.
It's about a Model B Ford engine head, from 
The prospects for Irene in the northeast change by the hour. Last night, she was downgraded but now it's just confusing. However, if she does hit New England hard, don't be surprised if Maggie's is down for a while. As of now, predictions are just "rain and wind" on Sunday, warm and sunny Monday. (That's obviously an old toon from the files)
Image via 