Speaking of graduate research, in getting ready for my next big rock show on Sunday in Pasadena (you’re invited if you’re close) I usually spend some time listening to old tunes for something to throw in at the last minute.
Yesterday, I got sidetracked onto British Invasion, Herman’s Hermits, in particular.
While they were a Mickie Most-produced bunch, they actually did play their instruments quite well. And it came through on the hits for the US market.
Here’s a charming clip, “Henry the 8th,” from Sullivan.
Lek’s guitar solo is perfect.
And here, from a televised British concert, where they’re obviously reproducing it live, “She’s a Must to Avoid” and the much less well known “You Won’t Be Leaving:”
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.
A reader sends in a piece collecting recent espionage convictions. All of them collaborations between Chinese handlers and American sell-outs.
It is not particularly surprising given our national character and the sheer size of military development and manufacturing. It stands to reason that a certain percentage can always be turned with money as a lure.
An excerpt:
Today’s “agents” are professors and engineers, businessmen exporting legitimate products while also shipping restricted technology and munitions, criminal capitalists who see only dollar signs. While some may be acting at the direction of a government handler, others supply information to firms for either private enterprise or state-sponsored research — or both.
I’ve never thought much of Chinese efforts to steal everything. From movies and music to military gear, whatever it is, they’re copyists — sometimes good, often very bad.
And it’s not like we haven’t fostered it. It’s has been to corporate America’s advantage to sell off the nation’s treasure to China for the sake of cheap labor. You get back what you’ve asked for, apparently.
It is much like the occasional story in which Fender or Gibson’s businesses in the US complain about Chinese counterfeits being sold on eBay, all probably made in the factories both companies commissioned to outsource labor.
In other words, karmically, they have it coming.
In terms of military hardware or dual use things, just because that labor is protected in the US for national security reasons really makes no difference in the great fire sale.
As a last note, these types of stories — always mentioning how China is modernizing its military — do show that country’s far from infallible.
Refurbishing things that are already obsolete should be encouraged. It’s like finding people who believe polishing turds is a great idea. Since we have some of them here, why shouldn’t the Chinese have some of the fun, too?
One of Businessweek’s columnists notices that the Republican budget plan calls for killing education.
The thesis seems to be that even a business publication is getting alarmed when the eating of the seed corn and tearing of everything down becomes so noticeable.
Where the man gets it all wrong is near the finish. He seems to think that certain types of schooling, like trivial vocational training, made this country great.
It doesn’t. The biotech revolution, which he mentioned, happened because lots of people like me got Ph.D’s in the hard sciences. Period.
The education pipeline is worsening, too. The U.S. was once the world’s leader in mass education, with succeeding generations of children better educated then their parents. The trend toward ever-greater educational achievement has slowed since the 1970s, according to Harvard University economists Claudia Goldin and Lawrence Katz. They note that the U.S. has slipped from the top of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development’s ranking for high school graduates to near the bottom. The U.S. college graduation rate has remained steady over the last decade, but the country has the highest college dropout rate among OECD nations.
Help Wanted: Well-Educated Workers
Yet demand for well-educated workers is rising. According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, about half of the 30 fastest-growing occupations in the U.S.—jobs such as biomedical engineers and financial examiners—require at least a bachelor’s degree. Entry into an additional seven growth occupations, including dental hygienists and occupational therapy assistants, requires either an associate’s degree or a postsecondary vocational certificate.
Here’s the thing: The quality of retirement for the Baby Boom generation—from Social Security to private pensions—will depend on cash flow created by the current generation of young people. From the Morrill Land Grant College Act of 1862 to the G.I. Bill of 1948 and on to the National Defense Education Act of 1958, the lesson of history is clear: Education pays.
For example, the NDEA funded the education of a generation of young people that became the driving force behind the infotech and biotech revolutions.
You can be well-meaning and concerned and still be an utter fool. Like this man.
Financial examiner jobs require a college degree. Big deal. The present job market may desire financial examiners but the idea that an army of them will lead to future progress is deluded.
And filling the territory with platoons of dental hygeinists and occupational therapy assistants isn’t an answer for anything except maintaining clean teeth in people with health plans and, as for the second, c’mon. We’re going to innovate our way back into the lead with people trained to rehabilitate those who’ve had strokes and fractured hips?
As mentioned last week, this country doesn’t lack for human capital. It lacks vision and the desire to do something with it because it’s far simpler to run an entrenched vulture economy. We do have well-educated workers. My experience at the census proved it.
But even a good education no longer guarantees a middle class job. The GOP is not the only enemy here. The Democratic Party owns a big share of the responsibility for the way things have turned out. So does corporate America.
“Increasing exports, as the administration aims to do, is a promising strategy.”
Can someone get these people an intro econ textbook? Increasing exports is not what creates jobs, it is increasing net exports (exports minus imports) that creates jobs.
If GM shuts an assembly plant in Ohio and instead ships its car parts to Mexico to be assembled there, are these parts exports creating jobs? In Washington Post land the answer is apparently “yes.” Unfortunately in the real world the answer is no. Since we have been increasing our imports more rapidly than we have increased our exports, the United States has been running a big trade deficit, leading to a large loss of jobs. (The trade deficit also implies negative national savings — and therefore either large budget deficits or negative private savings or some combination, but we’ll leave this issue for another day.)
Finally, the Post conclues by urging patience:
“The costs, human and economic, of high unemployment are heartbreaking. But it will take a measure of patience as well as a sense of urgency to prevent it from becoming a permanent feature of the U.S. economic landscape.”
Yes, all the buffoons running economic policy who could not see the largest asset bubble in the history of the world are still there running economic policy. All the Wall Street clowns who made a fortune pushing junk mortgages and packaging them into complex financial instruments are still rich. That’s just the way it is. The rest of us just need to be patient.
It’s worth adding that “increasing exports” the administration’s way usually just means either mostly arms deals or insignificant bumps in opening foreign markets to SUVs, and plutocracy artisanal economy products from small companies that very rarely expand their workforces in southern California.
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.