SARAH HOYT: OCCUPIED! “I don’t think there has ever been a country like ours, where our elites are deliberately taught – in our best schools – to hate and despise everything that we are, everything that makes us unique. I don’t think there has ever been another country where our elites are taught to be ashamed to call themselves by our national name.”

UPDATE: Seth Barrett Tillman emails:

Sarah A. Hoyt writes: “I don’t think there has ever been a country like ours, where our elites are deliberately taught – in our best schools – to hate and despise everything that we are, everything that makes us unique. I don’t think there has ever been another country where our elites are taught to be ashamed to call themselves by our national name.” Ms Hoyt may be correct about the United States, but she is wrong in embracing the mantle of American exceptionalism.

Look at the United Kingdom – the Cambridge 5 were recruited at Cambridge University, not the University of Lower Upsala at Hoople-on-Tyne. (Just read Smiley’s People or any other LeCarré novel.) The Scots will vote on independence in 2014, to coincide with the Battle of Bannockburn: a 1314! Scottish military victory against the foreign (English) invader. The British government has mandated devolved legislative entities in Wales, Scotland, and Northern Ireland: creating (or, at least, reifying) incipient national identities. The devolved Scottish legislature is considering making Scots-Gaelic required in primary schools. Somehow being British and speaking English is no longer enough.

And you’d be wrong to believe these attitudes are local only to the English-speaking world. See, e.g., Ze’ev Chafetz, Heroes and Hustlers, Hard Hats and Holy Men: Inside the New Israel (1986): “[Amos] Oz … is often referred to as Israel’s foremost novelist …. Like a number of other Israeli intellectuals, Oz lives in a state of perpertual dissatisfaction with his country and its people ….”.

The Cambridge 5 did not betray their country because they embraced communism, they embraced communism as a means to undermine a country and a people they already despised.

Perhaps our ruling class, in its (justifiable) self-loathing, wants to punish those who empowered it. Note that this self-loathing seems largely to afflict leftists; but then, that’s where it’s most justified.

FROM JOHN KANG, thoughts on law and the obligation of “manly courage:” “Congress defends restricting the military draft to men based on the view that they are more courageous than women, a decision upheld by the Supreme Court. Military courts martial have only disciplined male soldiers for the formal offense of ‘cowardice,’ as though it were natural to expect courage from men, but not women. State criminal laws exploit men’s fears by permitting the excuse of deadly self-defense only for, in the law’s words, a ‘man of courage,’ not a ‘coward.’ . . . No man, according to society, is amazing, or even plain acceptable, unless he proves his mettle. That does not mean that courage alone will suffice to make you a man but, for good or ill, without it, no one will think of you as one.”

NEWS YOU CAN USE: Nine Rules For Mastering The Squat For Leaner, Stronger Legs.

UPDATE: Reader Bart Hall writes: “As I approach age 65 I’m quite happy to be squatting over 350 lb for multiple reps (10s), and agree with all said in the article. One additional tip: keep the weight over the centre of gravity, go deep, and as needed roll the bar back onto your shoulders as you go down. Big air, strong abs, and go for it.”

AT AMAZON, hourly Lightning Deals in the Off-to-College store.

Plus, bestselling Pet Supplies.

ED DRISCOLL: Oprah-Vu: Oprah’s Swiss Handbag Story Sounds Kinda Familiar. “Oprah’s latest incident sounds very similar to a story from 2005 involving previous Continental shopping woes inflicted upon the multimillionaire superstar. . . . After this year’s incident and her previous retail challenges in 2005, we must ponder why someone so wealthy and successful keeps having such trouble from high-end European merchants? And why has Oprah’s staff been so consistently incompetent over the years that they can’t coordinate store hours during the precious time their boss has free during her overseas excursions, and pre-screen the best clerks to work with her, etc?”

Plus, this quote: “I suspect that there is another reason why the press is so fixated on race these days. The left’s agenda is in tatters. Obamacare has crashed on takeoff, after five years of Democratic policies the economy is in the doldrums and we are nearly $17 trillion in debt, and the Obama administration’s foreign policy is is disarray. The Democratic Party, as represented by the press, desperately needs sideshows to 1) rally the party’s faithful, and 2) distract the rest of us from the failures of the liberal agenda. Thus, I don’t think it is a coincidence that liberals are doing their best to portray the summer of 2013 as more or less a replay of 1967. The silliness of the attempt is a measure of how out of ammo liberals are these days.”

HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: Student-Loan Load Kills Startup Dreams.

The rising mountain of student debt, recently closing in on $1.2 trillion, is forcing some entrepreneurs to abandon startup dreams and others, including Christine Carney of Orono, Maine, to radically reshape their business plans.

Ms. Carney, 29 years old, and her husband, John, 31, started Thick & Thin Designs, making and selling food picks in the shapes of zombies, bikes and deer antlers after a brainstorming session while she was cooking dinner. The couple, both students at the University of Maine, where he is earning a master’s degree in fine arts and she is earning her second undergraduate degree, in zoology, sell the picks for about $12 a dozen as decorative cupcake toppers.

But they chose not to purchase a laser cutter, because doing so would require them to take out a business loan—and together they have $140,000 in leftover student debt. Instead, they use a university-owned laser cutter, which limits the size of the acrylic sheets they can work with. Having the student-loan debt “is preventing me from being able to take a lot of chances or risks that are usually necessary when starting a business,” Ms. Carney says.

The average student who borrows has piled up about $40,000 in debt by graduation, including parents’ loans, nearly double the levels of a decade ago . . . Some academic experts say leftover loans are the biggest impediment to upstart entrepreneurship by those who recently received college or graduate degrees. “I mentor students all the time,” says Vivek Wadhwa, a fellow at Stanford University Law School. “The single largest inhibitor to entrepreneurship is the student loans.”

Recent graduates and college dropouts account for a disproportionate share of the founders of technology startups that have transformed the economy over the past decade, says Shikhar Ghosh, a senior lecturer at Harvard Business School. Many freshly-minted M.B.A.s “are willing to sleep on a couch for a year or two, but they can’t do it with the burden of student loans,” he adds.

Yep. Yet another reason why the current higher education system is unsustainable.

THOUGHTS ON TENTH AMENDMENT INCORPORATION: “Nor is applying the Tenth Amendment against the states a logical impossibility. We already know from cases like New York that states cannot waive Tenth Amendment-based limitations on federal power. So, if a state law directs state officials to assist in the enforcement of a federal law that exceeds the powers of the federal government, and doing so affects the liberty of an individual, this should give rise to a Tenth Amendment-based claim against the state.”

HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: College President v. Faculty Pay Increases, 1999 to 2007. Well, this is clarifying.

CAPITALISM VS. POVERTY: This chart shows what Bono is talking about.

AT AMAZON, Back-to-School deals in Computers & Accessories.

Also, up to 20% off on select water bottles.

Plus, warehouse deals on laptops.

21ST CENTURY RELATIONSHIPS: Marriage Is The New Middle-Class Luxury Item. “For their new paper ‘Intimate Inequalities: Love and Work in a Post-Industrial Landscape,’ University of Virginia sociologist Sarah Corse and Harvard sociologist Jennifer Silva interviewed 300 working- and middle-class Americans like Cindy, Megan, Earl, and Jan about their work and relationships. They found that as the American workforce and the American marriage have destabilized over the past half-century, marriage has become an increasingly inaccessible option for working-class Americans. While middle-class people like Earl and Jan are throwing money at their intimate relationships to keep them stable, working-class people like Cindy and Megan have been priced out of the institution.”

I’m not sure the problem is solely an economic one. From the comments: “Cindy’s and Megan’s issues don’t seem money-related to me. Rather, it’s a lack of common sense in choosing healthy relationships for Cindy and failing to get a basic high school education in Megan’s case. It also helps not to date jail birds.” In the bad old days when bourgeois values ruled, there would have been stronger social pressure to avoid those errors, as well as to avoid overspending and other dysfunctional behaviors. Now such values — or at least those who loudly espouse them — are practically transgressive.

UPDATE: From the comments:

They really do not understand the difference between correlation and causation, do they?

The same behavior patterns that allow a successful marriage lead, almost inevitably, to a middle class (or better) lifestyle.

Reynolds’ law follows as a corollary.

As usual. Reynolds’ Law has a lot of applications, if you look for them.

MATT WELCH: How Cute: Thomas L. Friedman Thinks the American People, Not Their Angry, Powerful Government, Would Be in Charge of Punishing Edward Snowden.

RAND SIMBERG: Hyperloop, Tesla, SpaceX, and the Usual Elon Musk-Bashing Nonsense. “I don’t think that Elon is a saint, and there are certainly some things for which to criticize him. I think he’s working very hard to build a company, but not hard enough to build an industry, and he’s reportedly pretty hard on both his people and his vendors, with a lot of churn in his growing company. But that’s not atypical of Silicon Valley, which is the model for all his companies, rather than the traditional hierarchical aerospace industry model. It seems to be working, at least in terms of revolutionary reductions in the cost of space access — with a promise of much more if he can get the reusability for which he’s ultimately aimed. I don’t know whether or not the hyperloop makes any economic sense (though I suspect that it’s certainly technically feasible), but if you’re going to criticize him, as many who love to hate on him seem determined to do at every opportunity, it would be nice if, just once in a while, the criticism would have some basis in reality.”

NEWS YOU CAN USE: Encryption Is Less Secure Than We Thought. See this has always been my intuition. I remember arguing with some cypherpunk types about this in the 1990s. My math wasn’t up to theirs, but I felt that they were a little too confident in how smart they were, which always seems perilous in encryption history.

NEWS YOU CAN USE: Easily Retrievable Objects Among the Near Earth Object Population.

BRINGING THE ERGONOMIC DESK CHAIR INTO CARS. Heck, I’m already missing the massaging seatbacks.

LIVING WITH BABY FEVER.

READER BOOK PLUG: From Bryan McDermott, Game Planning – A Super Short Guide to Getting a Real Job/Career. 99 cents on Kindle. “If you or someone sleeping on your couch has a dead end job, pointless major, or is befuddled by how the whole real job/career/income thing works this book is for you. In just 50 short pages dirty secrets of the education and work worlds are revealed.”

GENETICS AND THE MILK REVOLUTION. “During the most recent ice age, milk was essentially a toxin to adults because — unlike children — they could not produce the lactase enzyme required to break down lactose, the main sugar in milk. But as farming started to replace hunting and gathering in the Middle East around 11,000 years ago, cattle herders learned how to reduce lactose in dairy products to tolerable levels by fermenting milk to make cheese or yogurt. Several thousand years later, a genetic mutation spread through Europe that gave people the ability to produce lactase — and drink milk — throughout their lives. That adaptation opened up a rich new source of nutrition that could have sustained communities when harvests failed.”

RIPPLES: Microsoft Reverses Itself on Xbox One Camera Requirement Because of NSA Spying Revelations.

TAXPROF ROUNDUP: The IRS Scandal, Day 97.

THE COUNTRY’S IN THE VERY BEST OF HANDS: Big Blunder At The Money Factory.

MEGAN MCARDLE:

Why does air travel get left out of the mix when we’re talking about reducing our carbon footprint? . . .

The question answers itself, doesn’t it? Giving up air travel and overnight delivery is much more personally costly for the public intellectuals who write about this stuff than giving up a big SUV. If you live in one of the five or six major cities that contain virtually everyone who writes about climate change, having a small car (or no car), is a pretty easy adjustment to imagine. On the other hand, try to imagine giving up far-flung vacations, conferences, etc. — especially since travel to interesting locales is one of the hidden perks of not-very-well remunerated positions at universities, public policy groups, nongovernmental organizations, and yes, news organizations.

If we’re going to get serious about greenhouse gasses, we need to get serious about air travel. Going to a distant conference should attract the kind of scorn among the chattering classes that is currently reserved for buying a Hummer.

Fat chance. The inhabitants of Conferenceville are too important to make sacrifices.

UPDATE: A hedge-fund reader emails: “Who owns private-jet rental giant NetJets? America’s favorite crony capitalist, of course. You know, the guy who just cashed out of his Washington Post stake. Warren Buffett.”

SHOCKER: NBC News spoke with almost 20 small businesses across US, “almost all said” they’ll cut worker hours over Obamacare.