re: "Negotiations"

Dr. Jerry Pournelle at Chaos Manor (" The Original Blog and Daybook. ") posted some thoughts on the Middle East and the Occupy movement.

Money quote(s):

"The Israelis have traded 1,000 well treated prisoners for one mistreated sergeant.

I once told then Israeli President Weizman that I didn’t know how to govern his country. Of course that was preparatory to my suggestions on what I thought they were doing wrong. I still don’t know how to govern Israel, nor do I have the stake in the outcome that the Israeli government does, but that doesn’t stop me from suggesting a different course of action.

Were it up to me to negotiate for the return of a soldier kidnapped by Hamas, I would simply ask how many Hamas officials they wanted in exchange for my sergeant. “I need to know the number, because I have Mossad standing by to make up the list of Hamas officials we will have the IDF take as prisoners. The sooner I have the number the quicker Mossad and our special forces can do their work. We can then have the exchange. Please tell me the number.” "

I rather like the way Dr. Pournelle thinks.

"I have some sympathy for those who have a lifelong debt in exchange for some years of their lives acquiring an education that is in essence worthless. They learned no history, no economics, and little else of any real value, and they have little prospect of a job until the economy revives. They saw a $Trillion spent on stimulus and bailouts with not much result other than enormous bonuses paid to people whose contribution to the world is to move money around in circles. Not much of it seems to get down to the levels where they live.

Their view of the world is somewhat distorted but their education didn’t show them how to see it all more clearly."

A university education used to mean (correct me if I'm wrong) at least a core curriculum that should have been grounded in some basic humanities (English lit., composition, world history, Western civilization, &tc.) that would at the very least given college graduates the factual and analytical basis from which to think about things and make more-or-less rational decisions.

The proliferation of hyphen-studies courses crowding out the old-fashioned syllabi have lead to this.

"(I)t does seem a bit odd that the NATO air power including a US killer drone were waiting for the cavalcade out of Sirte. It’s unlikely that they stumbled on it, or that they were maintaining air patrols there. This appears to be a reasonably well planned kill operation. As to whether it conforms to the directive of protecting the civil population of Libya I have no idea. One wonders how the Presidents of Syria and Yemen understand the messages here.

Khaddafi’s body has been subjected to practices not permitted under the Quran, so it is clear that Sharia law does not yet govern Libya.

The execution of Qadafi was no more than he deserved, and the desecration of his body echoes that of the founder of united Libya, Benito Mussolini." (Bold typeface added for emphasis. - CAA.)

&

"Iraq will probably break up into its component provinces; almost certainly the Kurds will refuse to accept the sovereignty of Baghdad and the Shia. It is not likely that Baghdad has the means for the conquest of the Kurdish province, which may well proclaim its independence and apply for membership in the United Nations. Libya was united under the Italian rule under Mussolini. Just how strong the union between Cyrenaica and Tripolitania has been forged is not clear. There are plenty of reasons for conflict. The stakes are high, and the US has considerable interest in the matter, but it is not clear that the US has any strong influence over the outcome." (Bold typeface added for emphasis. - CAA.)

10/24

re: "Total Failure"

Froggy at Blackfive ("the paratrooper of love") sees the dead hand of America's education establishment behind the Occupy movement.

Money quote(s):

"If there is any coherent message that can be gleaned from the Occupy Wall Street “movement”, it is that our system of public and higher education can now be declared a total and complete failure. The fact that there exists no accountability at any level of our Education-Industrial Complex is perfectly clear for all to see."

For those under crushing student loan debt, why is it that you're mad at the people who loaned you the money in the first place, rather than the universities that consumed it (even as the easily available loan money encouraged schools to steadily, and greatly in advance of inflation, increase tuition costs)?

"(A) child that makes it through that system without dropping out shows up on a college campus totally unprepared for collegiate level academics finds him/herself in a psych, sociology, history, or literature class where their glaring deficiencies aren’t as much of a hindrance as they would be in Chemistry, Calculus, or Physics. Waiting for them there is a tenured hack with the full panoply of liberal/socialist agenda items infused into their course who sees his mission as one of evangelism rather than education. The classes are easy and even inspiring as the ponytailed professor shovels decades old, discredited, leftist socio-racial-economic dogma onto the student’s plates and rewards them for vomiting it back to him with no thought or concern whether those ideas have any practical application whatsoever."

CAA managed (through no particular virtue of his own) to dodge this particular minefield. Can anyone comment as to how accurate the depiction is?

"At the end of the day these young people have been destroyed, perhaps permanently, by adults whose only priority was a government paycheck and the privilege of suspending reality by living in the ivory tower. They are pitiable creatures indeed, and the fact that they are out in public proclaiming their abject ignorance through the humiliating use of the “human microphone” ought to be to the eternal shame of those who have allowed and facilitated this disastrous system of failure inculcation we call education."

10/12

re: "How Do You Know You Have Been “Educated”?"

Shannon Love at Chicago Boyz addressed the swindle at the heart of the education bubble.

Money quote(s):

"(M)any of these young people may not understand that they aren’t really, despite the time and money spent, actually educated.

The liberal arts of today are those fields with little or no empiricism. In other words, if the field doesn’t have a lot of math, the information it deals with is subjective and untestable. Even supposed “soft” sciences in the liberal arts like sociology or psychology lack true scientific rigor. Given that, how do liberal-arts graduates know that they’ve really been taught something worthwhile? How do they know they haven’t been loaded up with gibberish?"

I recall my freshman 5-hour engineering calculus professor explaining that the reason for learning all that math was simply so that people couldn't lie to you, that you would be able to tell when something wasn't mathematically so, that you would know what was true (and what wasn't).

"Most of what is taught in the liberal arts does not equip the student with objective skills. Instead, most of what students learn are elaborate hypotheses validated only by a popularity contest among the professors themselves. Most of those hypotheses will end up judged by history to be gibberish — e.g., Marxism.

Most degrees in the liberal arts, especially the advanced degrees, really just equip the student to become a liberal-arts professor. Given how few professorships open up, most liberal-arts graduates don’t actually end up with marketable skills.

I think a lot of liberal-arts graduates have been convinced they have learned something of great value. Why should they believe otherwise? We are taught since childhood how wise and wonderful all our teachers are. We are told how uplifting and ennobling education is. Why would students question whether their trusted professors are teaching them anything true and/or valuable in the future workplace?

What a horrible realization to find out that you haven’t actually been educated. What a horrible realization to find out you owe tens of thousands of dollars and you don’t have any skills to compensate. What a horrible realization to find out you are no more employable than someone who never went to college in the first place.

These kids feel cheated and they are right. They were told they were actually getting “educated” but they weren’t. They borrowed tens of thousands of dollars for nothing."

Postgraduate studies are a mechanism for producing more academics; professors, in other words. And since there simply aren't enough professorships to go around, it amounts to something of a Ponzi scheme run by universities.

11/8

re: "College As Ritual"

Shannon Love at Chicago Boyz examined the consequences of faulty assumptions.

Money quote(s):

"A constant refrain is that young adults went tens of thousands of dollars into debt for degrees and now they can’t find even minimum wage jobs. I don’t think they really understand the purpose of education."

The purpose of education, from the standpoint of a student (and their long-suffering parents) is to prepare someone to enter "the professions." From a societal standpoint, such as that envisioned by the Morrell Land Grant Act, was to train tomorrow's leaders of society, to include the training of militia officers.

"Carefully missing from most of the complaints is the type of degree they got, but I think it’s fairly clear that most of these people got liberal-arts degrees. Moreover, there is no evidence that they pursued these degrees with any eye towards practical economic returns for their considerable financial investment.

I really get the sense that many of these people simply don’t understand that an education is supposed to equip you with skills that make you valuable to other people. Instead, I think these kids have somehow got the idea that college is more of a ritual you have to go through, a kind of right of passage, that entitles you to a middle-class or better life-style while pursuing a job you find interesting and emotionally fulfilling."

The mindset isn't all that new, and it wasn't all that long ago (just a few short years) that possession of the sheepskin itself was a sufficient credential to guarantee a middle class job (or better) and the lifestyle that went with it.

The availability of massive amounts of student loan money has allowed universities to ramp up their fees many times the rate of inflation; after all, the students would simply borrow the money anyways. What matter that the universities and our government have successfully created the country's first nation-wide debtor class of indentured servants.

"We need to think long and hard how so many young people simply don’t understand the purpose of education. Where did they get the idea that a liberal-arts degree automatically entitled them to a middle-class income that could easily pay off tens of thousands in student loans?"

The first part (liberal arts degree = middle class income) is somewhat unfair to lay all of the blame for on the students, given that it had been true not so long before.

The second part is newer; there never used to be that much student loan money available. Taking on that kind of debt without learning a "hard" degree such as in engineering, science & technology, accounting, or at least business, was an iffy proposition at best. It betrays something of a fantastical mindset, as if all of them expected to marry into money or something.

11/8

re: "Occupy What?"

Victor Davis Hanson at Private Papers puts the Occupy movement into broader context.

Money quote(s):

"No wise politician should invest in the bunch like those rampaging in Oakland [2]. Their nocturnal frolics are a long way from Woody Guthrie’s Deportee, the Hobos’ “Big Rock Candy Mountain,” and the world John Steinbeck fictionalized. It is the angst of the wannabe class, overeducated and underemployed, which chooses to live not in Akron or Fowler, but in tony places like the Bay Area or New York, where annual rents are far more than a down payment on a starter house in the Midwest. Being educated, but broke and in proximity to the wealthy of like upbringing and background, are ingredients for riot." (Bold typeface added for emphasis. - CAA.)

That last is as true in America as it is in Cairo, Beijing, Rome, or Paris.

"I don’t think the protests are really much over the Goldman Sachs bailout, or jerks like revolving-door Budget Director Peter Orszag starting back up at Citigroup, or Solyndra crony capitalism. Apparently, most middle-class and upper-middle class liberals — many of them (at least from videos) young and white [3] — are angry at the “system.” And so they are occupying (at least until it gets really cold and wet) financial districts, downtowns, and other areas of commerce across the well-reported urban landscape. As yet there is no definable grievance other than anger that others are doing too well, and the protestors themselves are not doing at all well, and the one has something to do with the other. I am not suggesting union members and the unemployed poor are not present, only that the tip of the spear seems to be furious young middle class kids of college age and bearing, who mope around stunned, as in “what went wrong?” " (Bold typeface added for emphasis. - CAA.)

CAA is given to understand that some, perhaps most, college students are burdened with large amounts of student loan debt.

CAA finds this puzzling, mostly because CAA financed his college tuition through a combination of money earned through work, scholarships, savings (including some thousands saved by my parents in my name), employer tuition assistance, and veteran's benefits. Some tuition payments were made via credit card, which I suppose could be considered a sort of college loan, but only in the most general sense.

So CAA's understanding of the "education bubble" is perhaps somewhat superficial, even unsympathetic.

"Students rarely graduate in four years, but scrape together parental support and, in the bargain, often bed, laundry, and breakfast, federal and state loans and grants, and part-time minimum wage jobs to “go to college.” By traditional rubrics — living at home, having the car insurance paid by dad and mom, meals cooked by someone else — many are still youths. But by our new standards — sexually active, familiar with drugs or alcohol, widely traveled and experienced — many are said to be adults.

Debt mounts. Jobs are few. For the vast majority who are not business majors, engineers, or vocational technicians, there are few jobs or opportunities other than more debt in grad or law school."

Taking on even more debt (on top of an unmarketable degree) in order to put off entry into the wage-earning workforce even later strikes CAA as something akin to taking a payday loan to the race track or to Las Vegas.

"Students with such high opinions of themselves are angry that others less aware — young bond traders, computer geeks, even skilled truck drivers — make far more money. Does a music degree from Brown, a sociology BA in progress from San Francisco State, two years of anthropology at UC Riverside count for anything? They are angry at themselves and furious at their own like class that they think betrayed them. After all, if a man knows about the construction of gender or a young woman has read Rigoberta Menchu [4], or both have formed opinions about Hiroshima, the so-called Native American genocide, and gay history, why is that not rewarded in a way that derivatives or root canal work surely are?

Class — family pedigree, accent, clothes, schooling — now mean nothing. You can meet your Dartmouth roommate working in Wall Street at Starbucks, and seem for all appearances his identical twin. But when you walk out the door with your environmental studies degree, you reenter the world of debt and joblessness, he back into the world of good money."

There's an unending debate, a constant tension, between education as job training and education as intellectual development. It's unending and constant, in part, because they're not completely mutually exclusive, unless taken to an extreme or in a tight economy.

"Never have Americans’ prospects seemed brighter — vast new energy reserves, an unmatched military, disarray in Russia, the Middle East and Europe — and never have Americans been more conditioned and readied for decline."

Optimism and positive thinking is a force multiplier. This should be one of the chief lessons of the Reagan Revolution.

11/6

re: "Fear and Envy"

Lex at Neptunus Lex ("The unbearable lightness of Lex. Enjoy!") examines the "Occupy" movement.

Money quote(s):

"It’s been too easy, really. Too easy to pillory the paucity of real ideas emanating from the “leaderless” movement that wants, well: Something else. Too easy to point out the venality that re-occurs within every human movement of more than modest size. Too easy to point out the cranks who lie on societies fringes, waiting to latch on to the next procession and beat their bongo drums. Too easy tar the fresh-faced ingenues too easily preyed upon by those who have made their own modest way through life accurately identifying members of the victim classes. Far too easy to compare the kid gloves the “mostly white” Occupy set have been treated by the national media compared to rabid pillorying the “mostly white” tea party middle class received.

Still, something is going on here. Something troubling. I think it’s worth talking about, and for my own part, I believe the heart of it lies in fear, and that fear is turn fed by envy.

Our rising generation was told by their parents, their school teachers, the broader culture that the ticket to success in this country was to work hard in school and get a college degree. Do this, and this alone they were told in an era that preached self-actualization as the highest personal duty, and your success would be assured. Success, it was never quite said out of doors, being measured in various ways.

But with the dumbing down of portions of the academy, and broad access to what ended up being crippling loans, virtually anyone could get a college degree given five to six years. Whether that would be time and money well invested, well: I think we’re watching the result of that experiment play out."

Go back and read all that again.

Okay, now go and read the passages that followed, about hourglasses and inverted pyramids.

Discuss.

"The Occupy crowd doesn’t want to own and operate a gas station in Akron. They want a loft in Tribeca, and lacking any plausible means to buy it, they’d like to take yours. Or have the government give it to them. Envy, we used to be informed back in the old days, is a sin.

We don’t teach much about sin, anymore.

We are still a great nation, none greater, more wealthy, nor more powerful. Our janitors and farm hands use their smoke breaks to check the FaceBook pages on their iPhones. There is no hunger as the rest of the world understands the term, virtually no real material want outside of those toxic islands of dysfunction which the generous hand of well-intended government first created and now subsidizes. Ours is the land – uniquely, in human history – where the poor are fat.

The fact that the Occupy set are more intrenched at Wall Street than they are outside the White House leads us to the reluctant conclusion that their anger is misplaced, and indeed wrong-headed: They look for rescue to a government that lives in cheerful symbiosis with Wall Street to save them by re-distributing money from the “1%” to, well: Themselves. Which, regardless of who holds the political reins in Washington, will never happen. You don’t kill the golden goose, not if you want to be re-elected."

The facts about where Wall Street sends its campaign contributions are well known to those with the ability or inclination to read. Do the math.

"(B)big government makes for small citizens. They subsidized bad mortgage debt that drove the financial system nearly to destruction, and are in the process of subsidizing educational debt that has done little to improve our store of intellectual capital and global competitiveness but rather stands ready to enslave a generation."

Student loan debt is well on its way to re-introducing what effectively amounts to indentured servitude and, for the first time since Reconstruction, debt-peonage north of the Rio Grande.

11/6