Maggie's Farm

I think this is satire, but I am not certain. If it's not satire, we should do a fund raiser for a one-way ticket to Uganda where nobody has to work, or give her a free subscription to eHarmony to find a husband to take care of her. Poor thing, who has let anger destroy her spirit. But, again, I think this is sly satire. h/t, Protein Wisdom:

You have to look pretty hard to find any. Whittle is getting close to my theme that poverty of spirit is a bigger problem than material proverty in the Western world. Perhaps they are alienated from the means of production...or something.

This is a very good brief video (h/t SDA):

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.

From the Sultan's An Earthquake Comes to Washington:

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.

This is the larger earthquake shaking Washington.

Do personality flaws and weakness result in poverty, or does poverty "cause" personality flaws?

David French discusses.

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.

Roger Simon on Is Rick Perry a Dope?

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.

Grade Inflation for Education Majors and Low Standards for Teachers - When Everyone Makes the Grade (h/t reader via Insty via Inside Higher Ed).

One quote from the conclusion:

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.)

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.

Maybe most of the world is on vacation now, or taking breaks from their information-gathering and opinion-surfing. Still, I expected more interest in my racism post yesterday. Perhaps it is all old hat to our readers. I thought I did an OK job of pointing out that multiculturalism, when extended to acceptance and "tolerance" of self-destructive cultures or subcultures, is not a particularly noble or constructive mission (despite its obvious political motives).

Star Parker has a piece on the topic today:

 ...for the highly politicized parts of black America, the point has always been to keep race in American politics.

For black political culture that dominated after the Civil Rights Movement, the point was not just equal treatment under the law, but special treatment under the law.

Plus the assumption that more black political power -- defined by more blacks holding office -- would mean that blacks would be better off.

In other words, post-Civil Rights Movement black political culture embraced an agenda exactly the opposite of what the civil rights movement was about.

Its agenda was to get laws and policies that were not neutral but racially slanted and to put individuals in power based on their race and not on their character and capability.

So, according to the script of this political culture, election of a black man as president meant more than an end to racism. The conclusion had to be that if the man holding the highest political office in the nation was black, it must follow that blacks would be better off.

Anyway, I am back to my education beat today.

One of my repeated claims here has been that those who deserve advanced education are those who pursue it on their own. After high school, nobody should want or need to be force-fed most (I'll make an exception for Physical Chemistry and Calculus) of what they need or desire to know, so the only test of their desire is whether they pursue it on their own (rather than the simple credential-buying).

All learning is self-education, and "going to college" does not make anybody "educated." Furthermore, true students study throughout their entire lives. There is no finish line, and you do not have to be in academia to do that.

Dinocrat reminded me of iTunes U.

Of course, at Maggie's we are Teaching Company addicts. What's on TV? Joy of Mathematics

At Q&O re Herman Cain as Uncle Tom, Who is the “racist” here?:

The absurdity of Garofalo’s theory is evident to anyone who knows even a little bit about Herman Cain. He’s no one’s dupe. But to the racist left he’s the Clarence Thomas of the political world. “How dare he wander off the plantation. We want our escaped slave back!”

I have always contended that Repubs (and their allied Conservatives and Libertarians) are the non-racist party. It's the party of Lincoln, the part of Ike who desegrated the army, and the party whose support was essential in passing the Civil Rights legislation of the 1960s against a large segment of Dems.

I have always contended that the Left is the racist party in viewing American blacks as a helpless, feckless, childish category of people, a permanent victim underclass destined to eternal dependence on government actions and benefits and the beneficence of white Libs who want to take care of them, like pets. That's the "plantation" people talk about. In my view, this is a deeply condescending and insulting way of viewing any group of people.

People like Tom Sowell, Herman Cain, Mayor Nutter, Bill Cosby, Juan Williams, Shelby Steele, and many others agree with this.

Fact is, before WW2 there was a vast (although often segregated) black middle class in America, church-going, hard-working, self-respecting, etc. The disruption of the black family during the war (large numbers of black men moving north for high-paying industrial jobs), combined with the Great Society's enabling and supporting of family dissolution, have been the real problems. Young single motherhood under unstable and poor (due to the singleness) conditions are the obvious problem, and everybody knows it. No amount of money can fix a subculture like that.

Of course, there are still large numbers of middle-class blacks in America. However white Liberals, in their hypersensitive yet condescending way, are phobic about speaking about the self-destructive black subculture (even though there are poor white subcultures which are no different, and can be found anywhere), in the US as in the UK (vid h/t SDA):

(This woman has chosen government as her husband. She does not seem too bright, but is clearly gaming the system. What that piece ignores is how many entry-level jobs in the UK are eagerly taken by ambitious and entrepreneurial immigrants. "There are no jobs" because somebody else got to them first, or convinced somebody to create them. Same thing in the US: the Hispanic immigrants around here work their butts off, and are not too proud to get their hands dirty. Nobody has a job handed to them on a silver platter.)

So even though the US is probably the least racist nation on earth, it seems necessary to the Left to keep the racism meme alive - even with a black president. Otherwise, they'd have to talk about the truth of the (possibly insoluble) problem of underclass dysfunction and exploitation of assistance - regardless of skin tone. Free money.

To keep the meme alive, sometimes people have to look pretty hard to identify a sort of victimhood which requires or justifies government dependency and unequal treatment. Here's a beaut: Secret Racism Running Wild in Our Government.

As a "person of color" Michele Malkin says:

I’ve heard more than 20 years of this oppressive windbaggery from do-gooder liberals who treat my unhyphenated American brothers and sisters and me as treacherous puppets for The Man. Their smug refusal to acknowledge free will, individual choice and true diversity of thought confirms that race-obsessed liberals remain the most unrepentant and odious racists of all.

More at Legal Insurrection:

They have become their own self-parody, but they are dangerous because the constant repetition works in creating a public imagination that Republican candidates are racist.

So if you think it cannot get any worse, trust me, it will.

And back to England again, a Brit condemning gangsta culture denounced as racist: UK riots: It’s not about criminality and cuts, it’s about culture... and this is only the beginning. In other words, gangsta culture, criminality, drugs, and rampant materialism is just natural for blacks, right? He is being condemned because he doesn't buy that narrative?

The "racist" thing is insane. Neo-McCarthyism.

From our archives -

To create blissful Socialist utopias, we need smart, strong, deeply caring men in charge. Lefty men, like Robespierre, Stalin, Hitler, Mussolini, Mao, etc. Geniuses to rescue us from our pitiful fates as little people.

A quote from Fred Siegel's review of Flynn's A Conservative History of the American Left in City Journal, re 1820s socialist Robert Owen:

Owen anticipated both Marx's concept of false consciousness and Herbert Marcuse's of repressive tolerance. He insisted that men, because of the way they have been hitherto educated . . . are incompetent to form a correct or sound judgment. Creatures of their environment, they have been rendered irrational by the absurd doctrine of free will and responsibility. All could be put right if such subjects. . . . be instructed in better habits, and made rationally intelligent. But until then, Owen didn't want the opinions of the ill-trained and uninformed on measures intended for their relief and amelioration. No! . . . their advice can be of no value.

Owen's sentiments were exemplified by the most famous of the utopian communes, Brook Farm in Massachusetts. Influenced by the ideas of French social reformer Charles Fourier, Flynn writes, Brook Farm was stocked with Boston Brahmins, Harvard graduates, [and] descendants of the Pilgrims who retained the Puritan conviction that they were the elect but had little common sense. Failures at subsistence farming, dependent on charity for their Thanksgiving dinner, they needed to hire unskilled laborers in order to feed themselves. Writing about the plebes, one of Brook Farm's members, Charles Dana, insisted: 'We are in fact the only men who can really point out their course for them and they can hardly help looking to us for their advisors." But the laborers chafed under their supervisors feckless paternalism, openly mocking Dana and his fellows as "aristocrats."

My, my. How little has changed in the Left in 200 years. Utopians always condescend to us ignorant, feckless, unwashed, irrational "masses," don't they?

My personal utopia is all about freedom from utopians and power-seekers. I wish to control no-one - unless they are trying to harm me.

On MSNBC's Morning Joe today, economist Jeffrey Sachs, a self-professed supporter of Barack Obama in 2008, said the president has no plan to save the economy and that "there's never been a plan."

That's a big "Duh" from me, because, in cloud-cuckoo land, money just grows on trees and all you have to do is to harvest the excess from the undeserving lucky. This only goes to confirm the shrewd post from Powerline the other day.

Problem is, the numbers of those undeserving lucky are shrinking rapidly in this Obama economy. So who pays? And who hires?

Honey, while you're up, get me a Laphroaig please, while I contemplate the Dems' plans to go after assets - before death - instead of only income.

From Thornton's The United States of Entitlements:

The excesses of ancient Athenian democracy and its near destruction at the hands of Sparta made the founders particularly wary of direct democracies, which as James Madison wrote, "have ever been spectacles of turbulence and contention; have ever been found incompatible with personal security or the rights of property; and have in general been as short in their lives as they have been violent in their deaths." By empowering people no matter how lacking in virtue, character, or knowledge, democracy gives greater scope to their irrational appetites, leaving them vulnerable to factional strife or the demagogue who promises them the gratification of their desires at the expense of freedom and political order. Then democracy becomes "ochlocracy," a "mob rule" that descends into tyranny:

"For the mob," Polybius writes, "habituated to feed at the expense of others, and to have its hopes of a livelihood in the property of its neighbors, as soon as it has got a leader sufficiently ambitious and daring, being excluded by poverty from the sweets of civil honors, produces a reign of mere violence. Then come tumultuous assemblies, massacres, banishments, redivisions of land; until, after losing all trace of civilization, it has once more found a master and a despot."

Though this may seem like a dusty political philosophy lesson, remember that the United States has evolved perilously close to the sort of direct democracy that would have horrified the founders.

Taranto: The Five Stages of Obama - The New York Times offers therapy for a gravely ill presidency:

The Associated Press reports President Obama has figured out what to do about the unemployment problem, and you're going to want to sit down before we tell you. Ready? OK, here goes:

He's going to give a "major speech."

Wait, there's more! The Los Angeles Times reports that he's already "daring Republicans to block" the "job-creation package" he has yet to devise.

"Dare them to block it"? Is this Kindergarten? Everybody knows what things the economy needs to be unleashed, but the Dems will never do them.

From the Barrister, laptopping it in by the pool this week, ceegar in hand.

John F. Kennedy did not say "Ask first what your country can do for you," but that's where Liberal/Socialist politics have taken us. Such politics appeal to our weakest, most dependent tendencies, weaken the spirit of the people, and have the wanted, or unintended, effect of making all dependents and/or serfs of the Almighty State.

In a sense, we are all complicit, because almost everybody has something they want the Federal government to do, or to do more of, with their neighbors' money. People want their Medicare and their Social Security and their US Armed Forces and their national forests, interstate highways, and other things too.

See Thornton's excellent The United States of Entitlements - The 2012 presidential election will be a referendum on democracy.

What do you wish the US Fed government would do to fulfill your wishes?

Me? I want a pony.

A short while ago, Arnold Kling wrote a good piece about the growth industries in Western countries, especially the US. I cannot find that link right now.

They turn out to be Government, Education, and Health Care. I find it illuminating to view these sectors of life as industries: consumer-oriented service industries, largely unproductive, with the first two pandering to and trying to manipulate their customers and the third, well, in flux but it actually does produce things: artificial knees, medicines, treatments, stents for my friends, etc. - things that might help people be productive and independent.

All three have brilliant, expensive marketing machines - and all three are heavily subsidized if not totally paid for by the taxpayer. Who is paying the bills for these subsidies now? The Chinese - the reason we were supposed to eat our spinach as kids. They are paying those bills. We owe them, big time.

Or do they own us? Think about it: Chinese people are paying for our Medicare and our "stimuli"... It is pathetic.

From the admirable Sultan's The Not Listening Tour:

Listening to someone means accepting the idea that there are things you don't know, and things you may be wrong about. That's hard to do when you're working from a philosophy that insists problems can be solved by following a rigid social or economic plan from a tenured academic. Why would you listen to someone who doesn't even have a PhD and is several social classes below you? Instead you smile patiently while he's talking and then explain to him why he's wrong. And it that doesn't work, you pretend to agree with him, while explaining that both of you actually share the same agenda. Your agenda.

The left does this over and over again-- and then doesn't understand why it's reviled for it. Three years ago it sold the same totalitarian rubbish, the bad economics and meaningless slogans by passing it off as a messianic event that would transform all of human history.

Now the failed messiah and his million dollar buses are trying to salvage the disaster. And yet even staring into the face of the economic apocalypse, the misery they inflicted on so many, and the fall of the national economy-- all they can do is mumble about bad luck and pass off the same bad policies as a bold new approach to saving the economy.

People are hurting out there, and it is because the government has gotten in their way. People are fearful of what the government plans to do to them, and to their businesses, next. My take is that the entire US economy is holding its breath until 2013. In the meantime, people will hunker down and try to survive the economic plague.

Scores show students aren’t ready for college - 75% may need remedial classes.

So why do colleges admit these kids? Because they need the money and the warm bodies. It's an industry now. Low-tier colleges around here will take anybody who applies, and they will never flunk you out because they want the income.

I agree with Mead here. And I do not blame the high schools at all. I do not blame the kids either, who are neither academically ambitious, don't want to spend the money, or who just don't have what it takes but are happy to take 4 years of partying and extended avoidance of adulthood.

Furthermore, I believe that many "college-ready" kids should not bother. 12 years of education ought to be a good enough start for anybody who was paying attention. American high schools offer everything anybody might want or need, but they can't make anybody take what they offer.

I think lots of kids, especially boys, just want to learn how to do something practical as soon as they can. Most people are not natural scholars, and many natural scholars never went to college either.

I suspect something around 5% of kids can make good use of higher ed. If people really want education, you can tell, because they make great efforts to educate themselves in their spare time. If they don't do that, I'd have doubts about whether they are really suited for higher ed of the liberal arts type.

Got a car or truck with a sticky ignition, where the key won't turn even if you wiggle the steering wheel and move the key in and out a little bit, or turn the key in the opposite direction to loosen things up? Or, worse, the key doesn't want to come out?

It can be exasperating and, at times, embarassing. Apparently it can be due to slightly jammed lock cylinders, or the wheel lock.

Some suggest a squirt of WD-40 into the lock but I am wary about doing that. I wonder whether any of our car mechanic genius readers have any ideas, short of an expensive trip to the auto shop.

Barone in the WSJ:

One thing that those romantic about Midwestern farms and factories tend to forget is that people hated working in those unionized factories, just as the young Harry Truman hated working on his father's farm. That's why the UAW negotiated "30 and out"—retirement after 30 years—with GM in 1970. With workers retiring well before Medicare age, the next union demand was the billions in retiree health-care benefits that more than anything else bankrupted the Big Three.

Michigan is an extreme example of what has afflicted the industrial Midwest. Big corporations were replaced by big government as the leading employer, and public-employee unions replaced industrial unions as the chief financiers of the Democratic Party. In effect, public-employee unions have been a mechanism by which taxpayer money, in the form of union dues, permanently finances a lobby with a vested interest in higher spending and less accountability. It's a lobby that's benefited from the Democratic Party loyalties of black voters, of Latinos in Chicago (the only large Hispanic presence in the Midwest) and of culturally liberal suburbanites.

This Midwestern model is unraveling before our eyes. The Midwest has not been hit as hard by foreclosures or unemployment as some other places, with Michigan an exception on both counts, but you have to look hard for green shoots of growth. They may be most evident in North Dakota, where low costs and light regulation have produced booms in energy and high tech.

But amid the recession, Midwestern Obama Democrats and their public-union allies lost their hold on voters in almost every Midwestern state, losing five governorships last year, including Iowa, and winning the Illinois and Minnesota governorships by less than 1% of the vote. A region that voted 54%-45% for Barack Obama in 2008 voted 53%-43% Republican for House candidates in 2010.

At NRO, The Sleeper Issue in Friday’s Obamacare Ruling

Prof B: Question for Mark Hall re Obamacare

Volokh: Distinguishing Wickard

The issue at hand, it seems to me, is whether there are any real limits to federal power these days. Seeing as we were a nation founded on the principle of limits on central power, it's an important discussion, to put it mildly. Some say that debate was over many years ago.

How the flavorless, colorless, odorless spirit became a billion-dollar business.

When I think about marketing genius, I usually think of bottled water. However, maybe the marketing of vodka takes the cake.

Water and vodka lack color, flavor, and odor, so they both present formidable marketing challenges which Madison Avenue has masterfully overcome in the effort to persuade you to part with your hard-earned money.

Dalrymple on the rioters:

"There are people here with nothing," this rioter continued: nothing, that is, except an education that has cost $80,000, a roof over their head, clothes on their back and shoes on their feet, food in their stomachs, a cellphone, a flat-screen TV, a refrigerator, an electric stove, heating and lighting, hot and cold running water, a guaranteed income, free medical care, and all of the same for any of the children that they might care to propagate.

But while the rioters have been maintained in a condition of near-permanent unemployment by government subvention augmented by criminal activity, Britain was importing labor to man its service industries. You can travel up and down the country and you can be sure that all the decent hotels and restaurants will be manned overwhelmingly by young foreigners; not a young Briton in sight (thank God).

It's about the unintended consequences of undiscerning compassion. Or, to be a bit more cynical, vote-buying. Genuine gratitude is the rarest of human sentiments.

“One man who minds his own business is more valuable to the world than 10,000 cocksure moralists.”

H. L. Mencken, as quoted in Cafe Hayek's piece on food: Choice is Diktat; Diktat is Choice