Archive for 2012
November 15, 2012
STARTING STRENGTH: The Importance Of What We Do.
Also: Learning To Press.
PEOPLE WILL LOVE THIS: Libertarians provided the margin for Democrats in at least nine elections. It’s particularly sad that libertarians didn’t back Mia Love. Really, you’re not going to vote for a candidate whose favorite economist is Bastiat? Apparently not.
RAVE CULTURE RETURNS: Electric Daisy Carnival. “The tastes change quickly because music is free and so widely available, so it’s easy to know what’s the most popular, and there’s this constant drive for novelty. Free music leads to quick evolution, and the music is like a virus.”
OUTSIDE OBAMA’S STATEN ISLAND SPEECH: “FEMA’s not doing too much to help us right now.” Plus: “They tell us we need computers, but there’s no power. We don’t have computers.”
I’LL SEE YOUR “GUMMY WORM” AND RAISE YOU an 8-foot-long, 27lb Gummy Snake. And it’s also good for disaster-prep: “The Party Python works out at more than 18 days of an adult’s recommended daily allowance of calories.”
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EMILY SCHRADER: What’s Really Going On In Israel.
THE HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE GETS A REVIEW IN INSIDE HIGHER ED — and I’m tempted to just quote this bit:
If the conservative bubble-poppers are a movement, Glenn Harlan Reynolds, a law professor at the University of Tennessee and a prominent blogger, has written its manifesto. All three of the posts linked to above refer to Reynolds, and George Will has also embraced his argument. The Higher Education Bubble (Encounter Books, 2012) is an Encounter Broadside, one of a series of pamphlets meant to “have an important effect” on policy debates, and so it has. Reynolds is a libertarian, not a conservative, but higher education’s conservative critics have joined him in not only predicting that the higher education bubble will burst but also impatiently seeking to burst it.
It’s nice that people are finally recognizing how important I am! However, I’m accused, more or less, of philistinism for suggesting that when college has a six-figure price tag, it has to produce enough earnings to pay off on the investment. The problem is that, well, it does have to. If you’re rich enough that you can spend the price of a fancy sports car on what’s basically a consumption item like, well, a fancy sports car, then you can afford to ignore that. Otherwise, not so much. Don’t blame me, blame skyrocketing tuition. But it gets worse.
As I note in the book, research indicates that today’s graduates are learning less, studying less, and yet paying more for college. What’s more, that underperforming education is supported by an increasingly unstable mountain of debt. It’s fine to study things that won’t earn you a living — just don’t borrow money to do it. Unfortunately, at most schools, most people will have to borrow money if they are to attend.
Liberal arts programs that turn out students who can read critically, think analytically, and write clearly and concisely have a good shot at producing good earnings, as people who can do all those things are surprisingly hard to find. But such programs are not nearly as common as they should be.
EVERY STEP YOU TAKE: I guess the 1990s pedometer fad is back. Not bad.
IS IT TIME FOR a new PR approach to sex scandals?
I MENTIONED RALLYPOINT.COM THE OTHER DAY, but here’s a news story.
WELL, FOLLOWING THEIR POLITICAL ADVICE IS WORSE: Disappointing results from following New York Times “trend” advice.
REASON TV: Oklahoma Doctors vs. ObamaCare. Posting fixed prices for surgeries online. Revolutionary!
PUSHBACK: Kirsten Powers: President Obama’s silly, sexist defense of Susan Rice.
It’s absurd and chauvinistic for Obama to talk about the woman he thinks should be Secretary of State of the United States as if she needs the big strong man to come to her defense because a couple of Senators are criticizing her.
Believe it or not, Rice isn’t the first potential Cabinet nominee to be opposed by members of Congress up on the Hill. Obama also left out the inconvenient detail that there is another senator who has Rice in the crosshairs: Sen. Kelly Ayotte. But perhaps a female Senator holding Rice accountable didn’t sound menacing enough in the era of the “War on Women.”
But it gets much worse.
Read the whole thing.
SEN. PATTY MURRAY: Democrats Won’t Commit To Doing A Budget.
ALL ALONG THE WESTERN FRONT, PEOPLE LINE UP TO RECEIVE: If Every Food Stamp Recipient Voted For Obama, It Would Account For 75% Of His Total. “If all 47 million food stamp recipients voted for President Obama, it would account for 75.4 percent of Obama’s 62.3 million votes.” There’s that 47 number again.
“THE WHITER THE PLACE, THE WORSE OBAMA DID” — and the more the economy has recovered. Makes sense to me. If Obama had done badly everywhere last week, the economy would be on its way to recovery everywhere . . . .
RED STATE CHIC AND MAU-MAUING THE CRUISE DIRECTOR: In the spirit of Tom Wolfe making his bones by crashing the party Lenny and Felicia held for the Black Panthers, apparently, another New York magazine journalist is onboard the Nieuw Amsterdam, covering the radical Red State chic of the National Review Cruise. Expect to see a combination of a mirror-image version of P.J. O’Rourke’s classic article in which he covered a Reagan-era Nation magazine cruise up the Soviet Volga, with plenty of Gorillas in the Mist-style, “Who are these people?” anthropological snark.