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.
Warren’s ploy is not that much more egregious than the thousands of Caucasians with Hispanic surnames who pass as minorities in American universities. White Chileans, Argentines, and Mexicans come to American colleges and are transformed into “Chicanos,” a category that has little reality outside a college campus. Hiring Basques or Spaniards counts as increasing “diversity,” even though they have nothing culturally in common with the mestizo or Indian children of farm-workers. So too with African or Caribbean blacks, who are hired not because they bring the unique perspective of their homelands to their intellectual work or teaching, but because they count as “black,” and thus are assumed to have some mystical connection with American black students and their cultural identity, which owes much more to American culture and history than to African.
Of course, socio-economic differences among American minorities are also ignored in the rush to promote diversity. A Mexican-American dentist’s or schoolteacher’s daughter who never cut a grape or washed a dish supposedly has some special insight into poor or working-class Mexicans. A light-skinned black son of college-educated parents who grew up in the suburbs gets to campus and suddenly has a rapport with the “brothers” and their experiences. An upper class Chinese is thought to be better able to relate to anyone designated by the meaningless category “Asian-American,” which obscures the fundamental differences and histories of Chinese, Japanese, Koreans, Thais, Laos, Vietnamese, Cambodians, and Hmong. The social capital that comes from education and wealth and that is used to define “white-skin privilege” suddenly has no value when it comes to the equally privileged ethnic “other.”
New forms of learning, or should I say "credentialing", are proliferating. It's quite wonderful to see. A friend's son, who works in New York, is finishing his Executive MBA at Cornell, online. As a young married fellow with a baby, he could not afford to skip work for two years.
His boss told him he promised to make the effort worth his while, and the company paid for it.
In the early 1900s, nearly 80 percent of Americans over the age of 65 had a job. Dora Costa, an economic historian at UCLA, says people stopped working only if they were no longer physically able to. They expected to work as long as they lived.
Is that really such a terrible idea?
Social Security was partly designed to prevent the frail elderly, those presumably abandoned by their families, from starving in the gutters. A secondary purpose was to nudge older folks out of the job market during the Depression. Of course, the Ponzi scheme vote-buying motive was there too.
Thus was the utopian concept of "retirement" sold to the American people. Today, for most people, Social Security is just one factor in their retirement equation, and everybody is expected to have a "retirement plan," as if work and productivity were something to escape.
I happen to be one of those fortunate people who likes to work. I like any sort of work. Retirement has zero appeal to me, although more vacation time does appeal to me. My goal is 4 weeks off per year.
Since it's a topic I have posted about a couple of times in the past, I'd like to highlight it. A quote:
It makes one think: If the lawyers are designing the health-care system, shouldn’t they be forced to operate under regulations similar to those they’re imposing? How, for example, do lawyers get paid? Today, they negotiate fees with clients. That hardly seems fair. In health care, doctors don’t negotiate fees with patients, they get paid according to an opaque schedule determined by health plans. Lawyers should do the same. The solution is “legal insurance”. After all, who amongst us knows when we’ll need a lawyer? It is often an unpredictable expense, and yet the “market” seems to have failed to provide such insurance. Government must intervene.
I have been an American all of my life, and I still cannot figure out whether Americans want freedom or freebies. Probably both, but that does not work.
They should be protesting the federal debt they are facing, instead of the debt they freely took upon themselves in an effort to improve their prospects in life. Apparently higher education does not instill emotional maturity.
Well, the answer seems obvious to me. Liberal Fascism. The authoritarian, or totalitarian, streak in the Left has always been there, and always will be.
From Prof. Johnson's piece:
What will it take for wider outrage to emerge? We've already had a case of an innocent student (Caleb Warner) expelled from school under the preponderance-of-evidence standard, as the AP article mentioned. But to my knowledge no congressional Democrats or liberal columnists commented on the Warner case. And so, I suppose, we'll continue to wait, and be told that issues of campus due process and civil liberties haven't popped up in recent years.
Many things in life do not operate according to Game Theory, but this version of The Prisoner's Dilemma, Golden Balls, does. Lying, of course, is part of the game. This is fun:
As Jim Manzi argues in his new book “Uncontrolled,” we can’t predict what this new work world will look like. It will be invented through trial and error.
What we can be sure of is that creating your own career will produce a stronger sense of satisfaction and fulfillment. Young people who do so won’t hate their work the way those autoworkers hated those assembly line jobs.
"Obama, it would seem, wants to deny to others what he will not deny to himself. He wants to deny to the children of others what he will not deny to his own children. He wants to amass riches, but he doesn't want you to amass wealth. He doesn't mind private school for his own children, but he minds it for your children. He doesn't mind eating whatever he wants to eat, but he minds what you eat. He doesn't mind taking that 747 one frivolous trip after another, one self-serving fundraising after another, but he minds what you drive and how much fuel you use. And we can go on and on."
I’ve written before about the U.S. government’s motorcade culture. Just last month, it cost U.S. taxpayers half a million bucks to fly Obama and David Cameron to Dayton, Ohio, to pretend to enjoy a basketball game. I’ve attended previous “Summits of the Americas” and G7 meetings and other international confabs, and always heard the same story wearily retailed by representatives of the host nation — that the money-no-object Yanks are flying in a bigger and more disruptive presidential entourage than everybody else put together. At this point, the local official usually rolls his eyes, and mostly, but not always, leaves the thought unspoken:
“Americans! What do you expect?” The Queen routinely turns down requests from visiting U.S. presidents to reinforce the garden walls and replace the windows of Buckingham Palace — for an overnight stay. When the U.S. was the richest country on earth, the mad excess used to impress in a crude kind of way: If you’ve got it, flaunt it. Now it’s the Brokest Nation in History: America hasn’t got it, but still flaunts it. Which is kind of pathetic.
...what's the next "ism"? This is hardly a trifling question. Professional rewards can flow to those who can sniff out the latest academic fad while money to be made by helping society cleanse itself of newly discovered cancer-like thought crimes. More important, being PC au courant means knowing the latest taboo, no small matter where an "innocent" slip of the tongue can be career-ending.
The next "ism" will be--brace yourselves--"realism."
The Christian apocalypse saw itself as a hopeful revelation of the coming of God’s kingdom. Today’s has nothing to offer. There is no promise of redemption; the only hope is that those human beings who repent of their errors may escape the chaos, as in Cormac McCarthy’s fine novel The Road. How can we be surprised, then, that so many bright minds have become delirious and that so many strange predictions flourish?
Punch-card looms were invented in 1801 and remain in wide use today, mostly computer-controlled now but it's the original principle and basically the original loom mechanics.
In politics, few talents are as richly rewarded as the ability to convince parasites that they are victims. Welfare states on both sides of the Atlantic have discovered that largesse to losers does not reduce their hostility to society, but only increases it. Far from producing gratitude, generosity is seen as an admission of guilt, and the reparations as inadequate compensation for injustices – leading to worsening behavior by the recipients.
Mitt Romney branded Barack Obama’s economic policies “European” in his speech last Tuesday after Rick Santorum’s withdrawal from the Republican primaries. As a British citizen living in Italy, it was music to my ears to discover that “European” has at last become an all-purpose term of abuse, at least in America, for a good reason...
Far from being an embarrassment to the Supreme Court, Thomas is contributing some of its most forceful and learned opinions. Even more remarkable, perhaps, is his willingness to go against the prevailing constitutional wisdom. Race probably did play some part in his selection. But by the time he retires, the general assessment will doubtless be that he was one of the most influential justices of his time.
I’m pretty sure both Obama and his administration’s lawyer were saying something different, and broader, when they invoked Lochner: By invalidating the Affordable Care Act, the Supreme Court would be resurrecting a vision of constitutionally limited government that, quite rightly, went out of fashion a long time ago.
That's a question I have discussed often here, along with the history of higher ed. Yes, we all understand that college has become a job credential, a social credential, and a professional prerequisite. Why that is has never been clear.
The common assumption among policymakers is that, in order to maintain its higher living standards against emerging markets competition, the United States must invest more in higher education. To achieve this, the government has instituted a massive student loan guarantee program, with over $1 trillion outstanding and an average of $25,000 in debt for every graduating student with debt. Yet millions of students continue to graduate with degrees that have no obvious real-world benefits. There’s a disconnect here, and it is beginning to appear that the current U.S. obsession with higher education is misguided.
The traditional idea of higher education was to train the literate for the Church, whether Catholic, Episcopalian or other Protestant. However a hundred years ago, for the elite on both sides of the Atlantic, a very different approach had been devised. This was best illustrated in Evelyn Waugh’s immortal “Brideshead Revisited” in which the protagonist Lord Sebastian Flyte wanders round Oxford with a teddy bear, drinking champagne, eating quail’s eggs and occasionally throwing up onto other students’ carpets. Americans will scoff at this depiction, but really the Harvard of Theodore Roosevelt was not very different, except in that it involved the occasional life-threatening game of football.
Flyte’s Oxford was not intended to train him for real life, it was intended as a highly enjoyable 3- or 4- year holiday before real life intruded. For the middle classes whose fathers were not Marquesses – a majority at Oxford even in Flyte’s time; there are only 34 Marquesses – the system applied a gloss of social polish and connections that was useful in later life, but did not impart more than a modicum of knowledge. Certainly the education provided was not expected to involve a huge amount of work, or to be useful in a subsequent career.
TigerHawk
From 
College students protest debt on "Trillion Dollar Day"
