MARK BAUERLEIN: Why The Millennials Are Doing So Poorly.
Archive for 2014
June 9, 2014
I WAS OVER AT LUCKYGUNNER.COM — the Internet ammo company founded by some of my law students a few years ago — and I notice that they have .22LR ammo in stock. It’s been kinda hard to get lately, so just FYI.
THE SINGULARITY IS NEAR: Eugene—the supercomputer, not 13-year-old—first to beat the Turing Test.
FEDERAL OVERREACH: First, they came for the cheesemakers.
Old guy in the cell: What are you in for?
New guy in the cell: I aged cheese on wooden boards.
Good grief.
BOSTON HERALD/SUFFOLK UNIVERSITY POLL: Obama Hits New Low In Massachusetts. “Just 45 percent of 800 likely voters surveyed last week said they approved of Obama’s job performance, while 44 percent disapproved, a statistically insignificant margin, the new Suffolk/Herald poll shows. Those dismal numbers represent the lowest approval rating of Obama’s presidency in a state that has always been one of his strongholds.”
WHY DO ENVIRONMENTALISTS WANT CHILDREN TO GO BLIND AND DIE? I guess, like Ebenezer Scrooge, they figure it will “reduce the surplus population.”
FOR BRITISH READERS, Sarah Hoyt’s Wings is now available in the UK for £1.99 on Kindle for a limited time. It’s $2.99 in the US.
JOEL KOTKIN: Watch What You Say: The New Liberal Power Elite Won’t Tolerate Dissent.
In ways not seen since at least the McCarthy era, Americans are finding themselves increasingly constrained by a rising class—what I call the progressive Clerisy—that accepts no dissent from its basic tenets. Like the First Estate in pre-revolutionary France, the Clerisy increasingly exercises its power to constrain dissenting views, whether on politics, social attitudes or science.
An alliance of upper level bureaucrats and cultural elites, the Clerisy, for for all their concerns about inequality, have thrived, unlike most Americans, in recent years. They also enjoy strong relations with the power structure in Washington, Silicon Valley, Hollywood and Wall Street.
As the modern clerisy has seen its own power grow, even while the middle class shrinks, it has used its influence to enforce a prescribed set of acceptable ideas. On everything from gender and sexual preference to climate change, those who dissent from the official pieties risk punishment.
Punch back twice as hard. And mock them mercilessly, as they are eminently mockable. Plus:
The Clerisy has thrived during these hard times. Since 1990, the number of government workers has expanded by some five million to some twenty million. That’s four times the number who were employed by the government at the end of the Second World War, a growth rate roughly twice that of the population as a whole.
The upper bureaucracy have been among the greatest beneficiaries—along with Wall Street and the green crony capitalists —of the Obama Administration’s economic policy. The number of workers, particularly at the federal level, continued to rise even at the height of the great recession. Between late 2007 and mid-2009, the number of U.S. federal workers earning at least $150,000 more than doubled. The ranks of federal nomenklatura—combined with a host of related private contractors —- have swelled so much that Washington DC by 2012 replaced New York as the wealthiest region in the country .
The upper bureaucracy has evolved into a privileged and cossetted caste. In California, state workers are allowed such special privileges as having their Department of Motor Vehicle records kept confidential; a sensible precaution for those, like police, who deal with criminals but now expanded to cover a vast array of public servants, including social workers.
America is sounding more and more like The Hunger Games. But is America ripe for a populist resurgence?
MICKEY KAUS: Cantor’s Mistake: “President Obama — by reducing deportations and granting ‘kids’ de facto legal permission through executive action — is mostly responsible for the more permissive atmosphere, of course. But isn’t that what Cantor wanted too? Potential immigrants pay attention to what Republicans as well as Democrats say — if you read the Spanish language press, you know the subject of immigration is covered there in depth and detail. (‘That is what they are saying on the news, that if you travel as a woman with a child, there is an opportunity to get in’ — Paulina, 29, to Arizona Republic.) And maybe Obama acted, in part, because he knew Cantor couldn’t really object.”
UNEXPECTEDLY! More patients flocking to ERs under Obamacare.
BIRTH RATES ALWAYS FALL UNDER SOCIALISM: Women are having fewer kids, and demographers don’t know why.
The fertility rate fell to a record low 62.9 births per 1,000 women aged 15-44 in 2013, according to the National Center for Health Statistics. . . .
Demographers expected the fertility rate to fall during recession, as financially strapped families put off childbearing. But what has surprised some demographers is both the depth of the decline and the fact that fertility has continued to drop even over the course of the country’s five years of slow but steady recovery. The rate has fallen steadily each year since 2007, when it stood at 2.1 percent. . . . The financial crisis “has had the most punishing impact on demographic trends of anything since the Great Depression,” Johnson said.
Maybe there hasn’t actually been a “slow but steady recovery.”
41-YEAR-OLDS AND THE LABOR PARTICIPATION RATE: “It is difficult to envision any obvious reason why people in their prime working years would suddenly decide that they did not want to work other than the weakness of the labor market.” But I thought we were fully recovered?
THEY LACK FAITH IN THE FUTURE: Urged To Multiply, Iranian Couples Are Dubious. “Iran’s leaders have taken notice. Worried about a steep decline in fertility rates that experts are predicting could reduce population growth to zero within 20 years, Tehran has started a broad initiative to persuade Iranian families to have more children.”
The one thing that might work — freedom and a booming economy — is unthinkable. Insufficient opportunities for graft.
LEST ANYONE THINK THAT CONCERN ABOUT THE HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE IS A “RIGHT WING” PHENOMENON, NOTE THIS PIECE FROM SALON.COM: Colleges are full of it: Behind the three-decade scheme to raise tuition, bankrupt generations, and hypnotize the media. “Tuition is up 1,200 percent in 30 years. Here’s why you’re unemployed, crushed by debt — and no one is helping.”
MORE ON THE VETERANS’ AFFAIRS SCANDAL: Retaliation Against VA Whistleblowers Under Investigation.
THE FAMILIES OF THOSE LOST LOOKING FOR BERGDAHL HAVE BECOME NON-PEOPLE: Wife of Soldier Wounded While Looking for Bergdahl Asks ‘Which Guy Is the Hero’?
WALTER RUSSELL MEAD: The Incredible Shrinking President: Hour by hour he gets smaller and smaller!
Less than two years after voters gave President Barack Obama a strong mandate for a second term, the White House is struggling against perceptions that it is losing its grip.
At home, the bungled rollout of the Obamacare website and the shocking revelations about an entrenched culture of incompetence and fraud in the VA have undercut faith in the President’s managerial competency.
Abroad, a surging Russia, an aggressive China, a war torn Middle East and a resurgent terror network are putting his foreign policy credentials to the test. With the GOP hoping to seize control of the Senate in November’s midterm elections, and the inevitable decline in presidential power that occurs as second term presidents move toward lame-duck status, Obama risks being sidelined and marginalized for the remaining two years of his term.
Last week’s tempest over the Bergdahl exchange seemed to roll all the President’s troubles together into a single storm.
Not so sure his reelection — with fewer votes than 2008 — was a “strong mandate,” but the most telling sign of incompetence is that the White House clearly expected the Bergdahl business to be a big, and easy, PR win.