Grad school has become a socially acceptable way to drink beer, read, and go into massive debt in your 20s.
This in a piece on how “education” is the next bubble.
Now, let me get this right. Everyone’s flocking to graduate school because the loans are sub prime and universities are the new Wall Street, cross-collaterizing and over-leveraging everything.
It is for the pimping of a new book, The Geeks Shall Inherit the Earth, by someone named Alexandra Robbins.
By now you’re wondering if it took longer than five minutes of brain-storming to come up with the title. Or the remarkable conclusion that Steve Jobs was a … geek!
“Yahoo! [is a company]—that prioritize hiring quirky individuals who shun conventional thinking,” reads the story, fresh from Yahoo’s corporate news organ, without a trace of self-consciousness.
“Schools can empower an atmosphere of inclusion, Robbins says, by mandating assigned seating in the cafeteria at least once a month, and by providing loose chairs so that people can move from table to table instead of being forced to choose and commit to a clique,” it reads.
Sometimes the only thing you can do is laugh at the comically mean people on Fox News.
On Saturday around lunch time I caught a few minutes of Stossel.
Run out of ABC a couple years ago, Stossel’s new show has one theme: Afflicting the afflicted. There’s no person or class too poor or bottom-out-of-sight to be spared the lash and some mocking laughter.
And while there’s always a lot of merriment at the expense of others on Stossel, the real humor is in catching the kinds of guests rubbing their hands together in glee and yukking it up over how they’ve exposed the manifold evils of the poor.
On Saturday, it was the rising menace of beggars, attested by two “experts” from — paradoxically — the poor man’s Heritage Foundation, the Manhattan Institute.
First up, Stossel put on a fake beard and pan-handled for the camera. He told viewers he could have earned a decent living doing it, extrapolating a salary from a modest sum he allegedly earned after a few hours.
Think of the argument this way: You find a twenty dollar bill on your way to the market tomorrow. If you continue with that as proof of your earnings power per hour, starting as a baseline, you’ll think you can make $160 a day, tax free.
Uh-huh.
But the guests took the cake, with everyone at one point — near the end — pointing out that poor people are the fattest in America. Because they, like, get a lot of free food and then use all their begging money in the purchase of liquor and drugs.
The only rational response is to laugh at the cartoons masquerading as rational people, for instance, one named Heather MacDonald of the Manhattan Institute’s City Journal.
McDonald’s routine is getting an audience to believe begging is out of control and that, by extension, beggars have the highest sense of self-entitlement in America.
Indeed, she’d have no career if it wasn’t actually rather easy to persuade a certain percentage of stupid but sometimes influential white people in cities that the real reason things are in decay around them is all the damn beggars and vagrants lousing up the joint, refusing to straighten up and fly right.
And if, in your opinion, begging hasn’t yet been sufficiently criminalized it’s only because MacDonald and the Manhattan Institute don’t have the lobbying might of agencies like the National Rifle Association or the Chamber of Commerce. It’s certainly been criminalized but enough is really never enough in 2011 USA.
I’d send you to Fox but the show was too long to endure just for the sake of seeing MacDonald.
Instead, I’ll just cite some of her over-the-top claims (you can read the rest) on the menace of beggar youth in San Francisco, here:
Four filthy targets of Homelessness, Inc.’s current relabeling effort sprawl across the sidewalk on Haight Street, accosting pedestrians. “Can you spare some change and shit? Will you take me home with you???? Cory, a slender, dark-haired young man from Ventura, California, cockily asks passersby. “Dude, do you have any food???? His two female companions, Zombie and Eeyore, swig from a bottle of pricey Tejava tea and pass a smoke while lying on a blanket surrounded by a fortress of backpacks, bedrolls, and scrawled signs asking for money. Vincent, a fourth “traveler,??? as the Haight Street punks call themselves, stares dully into space … The girls wear necklaces and bracelets of plastic disks and other hip found objects; their baggy tank tops and stockings are stylishly torn.
Of all the destinations on the “traveler??? circuit, the Haight carries a particular attraction to the young panhandlers, thanks to the Summer of Love. Starting in late 1965, waves of teens from across the country began pouring into what was then a ramshackle, blue-collar neighborhood of pastel Victorian houses and low-rent businesses, drawn to the emergent drug culture and its promised liberation from the bourgeois values of self-discipline and hard work. “The time has come to be free,??? a local flyer proclaimed. “Be FREE. Do your thing. Be what you are. Do it. Now.??? This insipid philosophy was eventually co-opted by consumer capitalism, while the hippie ethos gave way to punk, daisy chains to piercing, acid to meth, and mindless utopianism to mindless nihilism.
Over the last several years, the Haight’s vagrant population has grown more territorial and violent, residents and merchants say. Pit bulls are a frequent fashion accessory …
Merchants trying to clean up feces and urine left by the alcohol-besotted youth are sometimes harassed and attacked …
An unintentionally hilarious letter to the San Francisco Chronicle in January 2010 revealed just why the homelessness-industrial complex is so desperate to claim the Haight infestation for itself: government contracts. “The majority of the youth on the streets and in the park are in the Haight seeking support to address the issues that have led them there,??? wrote the executive director of Larkin Street Youth Services in criticizing the sit-lie proposal. “Funding to help these youths through outreach, case management, education and employment has been severely cut over the past two years. . . . Rather than rallying in anger, a better use of our time is to focus on helping youths exit the streets so they can find work and housing and become contributing members of the community.??? Translation: Homelessness, Inc. wants more money.
As for becoming “contributing members of the community,??? that’s definitely not on the agenda, either. Asked what he saw for himself in the future, a “traveler??? in the Stanford documentary rolls his eyes, smiles nervously, and shakes his head for nearly a minute before replying: “A hot dog, there’s definitely a hot dog in my future.???
For Stossel, beggars were momentarily expanded to a national problem, one perhaps contributing to the economic state of malaise.
Vagrants and freeloaders have such nerve!
And you know beggars are always the fattest people you see on the streets. Unfortunately, there’s no hunger in America. It’s because of all the free food and booze money, damn right. These people even have enough left over to feed pit bulls.
Occasional humor is found upon reading spam blogs which accumulate material through content scraping.
The scraped material is then laundered through an algorithm — or person.
It’s rewritten, so to speak, very badly, to unintentional comic effect.
I dug this out of the spam filter today, an example from a blackhat content scraper who’d taken material from this old DD post.
Rewritten by the content scraper, part of it now reads:
All about the cult of the electromagnetic pulse Crazy is heinous. Accordingly, one of its new leaders is Trent Franks, Republican MP relatively unimportant famous only for his extremist beliefs.
Of course, this could be a power outage. What happens when the weather is bad, which is not this day. The electricity company can work on the lines, but they are not. And even it they were, which could not account of failure of your cell phone or does your car – and the other on the road – all died at a time.
All the electric modern conveniences that we take for granted on a daily basis in the 21st century to go kaput – without an obvious explanation. And, therefore, modern life as we know, it’s a virtual moratorium.
The President is not an American, global warming and evolution are hoaxes, African-American had better under slavery, Sharia is poisoning the precious bodily fluids of the American judicial system and extended ammunition magazines are an American law.
This type of General world view of the people pushing for protection against pulse electromagnetic doom influences the way in which it considers their arguments. Even with the mildest interpretation, they were suspicious and hairless characters.
Astonishingly, HBO is devoting an hour long promotion to its upcoming Hollywood-ization of the Wall St.-led global economic collapse, Too Big to Fail.
This meant trotting out all the A-list actors chosen to portray the Masters of the Universe.
There’s William Hurt as Henry Paulson.
Paul Giamatti, an unbelievable choice despite the salt ‘n’ pepper beard, as Ben Bernanke. However, Giamatti is unbelievable as a wrestling coach, which was his most recently publicized role in Win Win. Paul Giamatti is only ever believable when playing pudgy schmucks. He is not a chameleon.
The big underlying problem is what I now call the Let’s Lynch Lloyd Blankfein Rule.
As I found, after writing a decent song about the CEO of Goldman Sachs, hardly anyone — except people who’ve read Matt Taibbi religiously — know who Blankfein is. So few had any inkling what the song was about and why lynching was recommended.
While they vaguely grasp that Wall Street did very bad things, fucking everyone over, that’s the extent of general static knowledge on the affair.
HBO has the same problem and I’m wagering it’s why it has such a long pre-explaining promotional segment devoted to pimping the dramatization.
However, if Michael Moore’s Capitalism — A Love Story and Ferguson’s Inside Job couldn’t catalyze change, this certainly has no chance.
And I’m assuming that’s not its purpose. Too Big to Fail’s purpose is as a loss leader for cable TV award nominations and blow jobs from big city newspaper television critics.
When the best you can come up with, other than actors talking about the parts they play — the equivalent of the porn industry’s solo sessions, are assholes like Fareed Zakaria and John Fund explaining why something is good, there’s no way you’re selling for people who actually, uh, like entertainment to be entertaining.
You watch Fund and regardless of whether or not you know who he is, the most likely thing to spring to mind is: “A dermatologist could do something about the wart on that guy’s eyelid.”
On a scale of one to ten rate the way you’d look forward to the following (with ten being $5,000 and a weekend in the Florida Keys and one being another weekend with only flaring hemorrhoids):
Watching a famous actor play Henry Paulson, the 74th Secretary of the Treasury of the US, in a made-for-tv movie.
DD apologizes if your comment has not posted quickly or has been lost recently. (One went missing today.)
The blog attracts a lot of spam.
Humans and bots are constantly working the archive.
One of the new techniques is to upload some content actually sort of relevant to the general topic of the post. It’s done by those in the blackhat SEO business, almost always for siphoning traffic through backlinks to business and foreign investment stock trading, dodgy financial products, tax avoidance and offshoring websites.
And while I don’t moderate comments the spam filter has gradually ramped up. In the process it catches some legitimate commenting which I then retrieve from the filter before they’re deleted.
I’m not always perfect at it. So if something went missing, and I’m sure some things have, I apologize.
In another sign of national decline, or the inability to do anything other now more advanced western nations do, AT&T begins limiting its DSL customers on Monday. Unlimited Internet access is over here.
DD is an AT&T. The service is already frequently abysmal.
Natch, the reason for this is because none of the big corporate Internet providers want to see their profit margins expand as more people watch high def television and movies on the Internet. They view throughput and capacity as premium commodities. As a consequence, they’ve had little incentive to improve their infrastructure, always preferring the short term highest profit margins.
In the meantime, US broadband access compared to peer nations is putrid. The story has been repeated so many times in the mainstream news media it requires minimal citation. If you live here, you know it.
If one were actually serious about winning the future, our fearless leader might make the case for Internet access as a utility, rather than just another premium service the profitable big providers can use to soak people for the sake of even more profit.
In related matters, ducks to the golden fool, ol’ sci-fi and libertarian author David Brin. I’ve accidentally caught two of his last columns for the Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies, where he’s a fellow.
With Roscoe Bartlett, Islamo-phobe birthers Trent Franks and Frank Gaffney, JJ Carafano and William Forstchen in the stable, there’s really no need for a David Brin. How could he compare?
Anyway, Brin’s newest column is on “Internet Access as a Human Right,” which sounds good, I think we can all agree. Don’t tell AT&T.
However, once the piece builds up a head of steam Brin starts yapping about government and economic transparency. In and of itself, coming it as it does out of someone who has apparently been living in the US in the last ten years, is a a laff riot.
Particularly when he gets to addressing Libya:
According to this Washington Post article, when the U.S. Treasury Department froze Libyan assets, they expected to find $100 million, but found over $30 billion—mostly all in one bank. To put this in perspective, in 2009, Libya had a gross domestic product of $62 billion.
Say what? Thirty billion dollars? If this cash pile is matched by similar revelations re Egypt and Tunisia and other toppled despotisms, can you doubt that economic transparency will become a truly radical cause during the twenty-teens?
…
Only in this case, we’re talking about a “radicalism of reasonableness.??? A militancy of moderation. A fervent and dynamic worldwide call for governments and corporations and oligarchs and rulers and economies and everybody simply to play fair. Compete fair. To rule fairly, the way Adam Smith and F. Hayek and nearly all cogent economists of left and right agree we must, if society is to be healthy at all.
A radicalism that Louis Brandeis spoke of when he prescribed the one thing that keeps a society healthy: “Sunlight is the best disinfectant.???
Let’s start with those despot nations, (he doesn’t mention our rather un-transparent and systemically unreasonable society), reads Brin’s piece.
We could shower the despot nations with free satellite phones, free Internet access from the Commando Solo air plane — the former possibly to be called volksradios, a name coined by Brin.
One of the characteristics of the clueless futurist is how he or she write pieces which are unintentional parodies.
Holed up in plush digs where no one emits the bark of a sarcastic horselaugh under penalty of expulsion, it does no good to reflect on our own fail. Not when dreaming of the export of wonderful things we no longer do or own — like in this case, transparency, to others.
Brin’s piece is well-meaning crap and it’s here. It does make obvious he’s been out of circulation for awhile.
The Time 100, however, is the opposite of journalism. It is a series of pre-packaged lies and public relations exercises that, in many cases, are unlikely even to be authored by the people claiming the bylines. Were they to be taken seriously, they would fall afoul of every conflict-of-interest rule known to the profession (and a few they may have invented on their own).
I wrote about last year’s issue, focusing on the oddity in particular of inviting Ted Nugent to lie on behalf of Sarah Palin. But even the adoring profiles that did not lie—or were not written by lunatics—still enjoyed zero journalistic value, and were useful or significant only to the people who got to put framed copies of their alleged wonderfulness on the walls of their studies …
Where is this year’s equivalent of Ted Nugent snuggling up to Sarah Palin? Well, this year’s Sarah Palin, you might have guessed, is Michele Bachmann. And the writer to take a good, hard journalistic accounting of her strengths and weaknesses? You guessed it. Rush Limbaugh.
Rush doesn’t mind admitting that he is “a great admirer of Michele Bachmann’s,??? as she is “a strong spokeswoman for unapologetic conservatism. She is neither extreme nor unreasonable, which is why her philosophy has resonated with grassroots conservatives.??? Problem is, says El Rushbo, that “she’s conservative. So because she is smart, talented and accomplished and a natural leader—not to mention attractive—the left brands her as a flame-throwing lightweight.???
I don’t suppose the problem could be that Bachmann is also an idiot. She thinks the Revolutionary War began in New Hampshire, not Massachusetts. She thinks the U.S. Constitution abolished slavery. She thinks slaves came to America because they were “risk takers … people that wanted a better life and were willing to do what it took to get it.” She thinks something called the “Hoot-Smalley Tariff,” allegedly passed by Franklin Delano Roosevelt, caused the Depression. She doesn’t know what years Jimmy Carter was president of the United States and thinks he had something to do with the spread of swine flu that happened during the presidency that preceded him. And she’s pretty sure that global warming is “all voodoo, nonsense, hokum, a hoax.”
And now for something different, this bit of phlogiston from a Brit pub on Christopher Hitchens. Hitchens used to be sub semi-famous on pundit shows in the US during the Bush years.
Then showing up smelling strongly of drink took its toll. Plus, cancer.
‘He’s one of the most terrifying rhetoricians the world has seen’…
Towards the very end of the last century, all the greatest chessplayers, including Garry Kasparov, began to succumb to a computer (named Deep Blue); I had the opportunity to ask two grandmasters to describe the Deep Blue experience, and they both said: “It’s like a wall coming at you.” In argument, Christopher is that wall. The prototype of Deep Blue was known as Deep Thought. And there’s a case for calling Christopher Deep Speech. With his vast array of geohistorical references and precedents, he is almost Google-like; but Google (with, say, its 10 million “results” in 0.7 seconds) is something of an idiot savant, and Christopher’s search engine is much more finely tuned. In debate, no matter what the motion, I would back him against Cicero, against Demosthenes.
As a young man, Christopher was conspicuously unpredatory in the sexual sphere (while also being conspicuously pan-affectionate: “I’ll just make a brief pass at everyone,” he would typically and truthfully promise a mixed gathering of 14 or 15 people, “and then I’ll be on my way”). I can’t say how it went, earlier on, with the boys; with the girls, though, Christopher was the one who needed to be persuaded.
Every novelist of his acquaintance is riveted by Christopher, not just qua friend but also qua novelist. I considered the retort I am about to quote (all four words of it) so epiphanically devastating that I put it in a novel – indeed, I put Christopher in a novel. Mutatis mutandis (and it is the novel itself that dictates the changes), Christopher “is” Nicholas Shackleton in The Pregnant Widow – though it really does matter, in this case, what the meaning of “is” is…
In the summer of 1986, in Cape Cod, and during subsequent summers, I used to play a set of tennis every other day with the historian Robert Jay Lifton. I was reading, and then re-reading, his latest and most celebrated book, The Nazi Doctors; so, on Monday, during changeovers, we would talk about the chapter “Sterilisation and the Nazi Biomedical Vision”; on Wednesday, “‘Wild Euthanasia’: The Doctors Take Over”; on Friday, “The Auschwitz Institution”; on Sunday, “Killing with Syringes: Phenol Injections”; and so on. One afternoon, Christopher, whose family was staying with mine on Horseleech Pond, was due to show up at the court, after a heavy lunch in nearby Wellfleet …
In conclusion we move on to 1999, and by now Christopher and I have acquired new wives, and gained three additional children (making eight in all). It was mid-afternoon, in Long Island, and he and I hoped to indulge a dependable pleasure: we were in search of the most violent available film. In the end we approached a multiplex in Southampton (having been pitiably reduced to Wesley Snipes).
Christopher is bored by the epithet contrarian, which has been trailing him around for a quarter of a century. What he is, in any case, is an autocontrarian: he seeks, not only the most difficult position, but the most difficult position for Christopher Hitchens. Hardly anyone agrees with him on Iraq (yet hardly anyone is keen to debate him on it). We think also of his support for Ralph Nader, his collusion with the impeachment process of the loathed Bill Clinton (who, in Christopher’s new book, The Quotable Hitchens, occupies more space than any other subject), and his support for Bush-Cheney in 2004…
“Is nothing sacred?” he asks. “Of course not.” And no westerner, as Ronald Dworkin pointed out, “has the right not to be offended”. We accept Christopher’s errancies, his recklessnesses, because they are inseparable from his courage; and true valour, axiomatically, fails to recognise discretion. As the world knows, Christopher has recently made the passage from the land of the well to the land of the ill …
Your corporeal existence, O Hitch, derives from the elements released by supernovae, by exploding stars. Stellar fire was your womb, and stellar fire will be your grave: a just course for one who has always blazed so very brightly. The parent star, that steady-state H-bomb we call the sun, will eventually turn from yellow dwarf to red giant, and will swell out to consume what is left of us, about six billion years from now.
For the delight of adult children, Michio Kaku is hard to beat. In the past couple of weeks I’ve seen him asked to bring light to the awfulness of the Daichi nuclear disaster on cable news.
It’s the way of the hosts and producers. If you smile a lot, tell wondrous stories and are glib — or are just wonderfully oily — you’re perfect for the jobs of science popularizer and explainer of all problems with a science component.
That’s Michi Okaku.
Earlier in the week, on discussion roped in for the one-year anniversary ‘celebration’ of the BP oil disaster, Kakio burst out:
“The solution for the pollution is dilution!”
Wow. Can’t beat that.
The adult kids who love Kaku need great stories, too. Preferably short, well-repeated ones, because they easily forget things.
“You’re the best guy to talk about this,” comedian Bill Maher says to Kaku before getting the skinny on the tragedy of Daichi, laughing it up.
First, Kaku compares the situation to nuclear facilities being run by a “Homer Simpson,” a rib-tickler he’s pushed for the past couple weeks. [Much audience laughter.]
“This is a science experiment and we are the guinea pigs!” Kaku adds.
The video of the segment is here. If you savor the image of turning a combined tsunami/earthquake/meltdown disaster into 90 seconds of laugh lines, then by all means, go – go – go!
Kaku knows that to keep the adult children cooing and clapping their hands in delight, you need money shots. Kaku’s money shots are his encapsulations, specifically this nose-gold:
“This is a science experiment and we are the guinea pigs!”
Here is Kaku last year, using it twice for the BP Oil disaster (the first incidence comes at about 5:30):
Good news, lads ! Good news! Olbermann may be gone but Michio Kaku ain’t!
A sampling of Kaku yields more riches:
On Daichi: And you begin to wonder, I mean, is Homer
Simpson operating this nuclear power plant?
Again on Daichi, this time on contaminated water leaking from the plant, for MSNBC:Well, think of the little Dutch boy facing all these cracks in a dike. This hole, that hole, that hole has to be taken care of.
For MSNBC, not Maher: We`re witnessing a science experiment with humans, us, as the guinea pig.
Kaku on the book he’s currently flogging, Physics of the Future:
The job market of the future will consist of those jobs that robots cannot perform. Our blue-collar work is pattern recognition, making sense of what you see. Gardeners will still have jobs because every garden is different. The same goes for construction workers. [Who will live in giant shanty towns because they’re only paid minimum for tending the gardens of the wealthy, like in California, now.]
The losers are white-collar workers, low-level accountants, brokers, and agents. Already when you book a flight, do you really talk to anybody? No. People involved in software, ideas, human values, leadership, and creativity will still have jobs in the future. [Like Michio.]
The military, of course, is pioneering this technology. They have a version of this now. I’ve tried it. Through a little eyepiece I saw an entire battlefield, with the positions of friendly troops, enemy troops, and tactics all marked.
Yes, the US military has these things which map out where all things is. That’s working well in [fill in the name of your favorite country we’re at war with.]
Our grandkids will lead the lives of the gods of mythology. Zeus could think and move objects around. We’ll have that power. Venus had a perfect, timeless body. We’ll have that, too. Pegasus was a flying horse. We’ll be able to modify life in the future.