So, the recent fiery yet “mostly peaceful” pro-Hamas demonstrations of support on various university campuses making the fiery and “mostly peaceful” headlines over the last couple of weeks may yet have unfortunate results for the affected schools. This would be a consummation devoutly desired by those of us on the sort-of-conservative side of the political spectrum, who have viewed the increasing academic lunacy and dysfunction with concern and mistrust. Honestly, it’s long been obvious that there is a massive stench emanating from those ivy-hung quadrangles of higher learning. The tuition to attend them has been increasing at a breakneck rate for two or three decades, even above the rate of inflation, while the graduates of those institutions appear dumber and dumber and the ratio of administrative staff to student body approaches 1:1. Of late, even those graduates boasting diplomas from formerly respected colleges appear barely scathed by literacy, or any kind of practical, useful-to-the-working-world knowledge and skills at all. No wonder that an increasing number of 18 year olds are coldly, rationally considering the cost-to-benefit ratio and opting for a trade school or an apprenticeship.
Worthwhile Reading, Viewing, and Listening
But here’s May Day in LA, as celebrated by the Los Angeles Teachers Union, along with other organizations
Cost of the student debt ‘cancellation’ is estimated at .9 trillion to 1.4 trillion.
In addition to paying for those student loans, get ready for much higher electric bills if Biden’s executive order is sustained.
Colorized 1890s videos of daily life in countries around the world
‘Woke’ hierarchy and an upper-class underclass
A former ‘woke’ woman. And another one.
How much will the campus chaos hurt the Democrats?
Biden compared with Disraeli
Laxman Narasimhan, CEO of Starbucks:
The thing we didn’t do enough of is really attack the occasional customer with delivering and communicating value to them in a more aggressive manner,” said Starbucks CEO Laxman Narasimhan. (speaking on the chain’s declining market share in the U.S.)
Pythia Capital says:
This sentence does not mean anything. One reason to read lots of transcripts is you find 95% of CEOs talk like this. They use jargon because they have not thought deeply about anything; they don’t know how to create value. People who cannot explain a complex subject simply usually do not understand that subject. When you stumble upon a management team that DOES know how to create value it is magical.
I think 95% is too high an estimate, but blather like the above is depressingly common, and not only reflects a lack of thought but contributes to lack of coherent thought. Even more than in business, the phenomenon especially common among politicians and among the followers of political ideologies.
Related: see The Costs of Formalism and Credentialism.
Quote of the Day, Rathergate Edition
Comment from Tony_Petroski, in this PowerLine Blog post that revisits the Rathergate affair and thoroughly discredits the Killian documents:
The Mapes Miasma. My what a miserable, manipulative. maddening, malignant, malodorous, mangled, maniacal, menacingly meddlesome mockery of a mendacious mockery of a misanthropic mendacious mockery it is. Her miasma has all the earmarks of Moldavian hacking.
If anyone ever gets around to writing a history of the war between peer review and open source, I hope this episode is included and Mapes lives to see it.
Taxes and the Total State
Biden has proposed a rather draconian tax initiative: you can read some of the details and an analysis here. It will be justified, of course, by claims about “asking the rich to pay their fair share”, and “equity”…and I’ve already seen arguments that no one should be concerned about this unless they are very high income or soon expect to be, and that there aren’t many people in that category.
Some responses are obvious: Taxes originally targeted at high income levels have a way of migrating downward through the income levels–the income tax itself is an example. The capital gains rates are in reality much higher than they look, because of the effect of inflation on asset prices. Corporate income tax increases can affect everybody, regardless of income levels, in their roles as workers, consumers, and/or investors. And there is the matter of fairness–true fairness, not faux fairness: it is not truly fair, democratic, or even civilized to assume that because there is only a small number of people in a given group, the rest of the society is entitled to do anything to them that they feel like doing.
But there is also, I think, an even more important point to be made. A tax structure like this Biden plan–with its likely extensions and increases over time–acts to prevent the establishment and sustainment of individuals and families wealthy enough to act as a countervailing force to the government–media–academic complex. I think the kind of people who inhabit the Biden administration, and who dominate today’s Democratic Party, do not like to see power & influence centers outside of this complex. They really, really don’t like it, for example, that someone like Elon Musk can bypass their censorship efforts by buying and running a social media company.
Whatever your current and expected income and wealth levels–if you value the continuation of America as a free society, then you have a dog in this fight.
Where Went the Wind?
Honestly, I’ve always been considerably conflicted about Gone With the Wind – both the book and the movie. Yes, best-seller, and loved extravagantly by more readers and movie-goers than partisans of the antebellum South, a gripping tale of a time, a place and a people, in a war that stripped away every shred of that noble and deluded gentility and Southern cavalier-worshipping delusion… shades of Vanity Fair, with a spineless, guileless and gentle supposed-heroine whom we are supposed to sympathize with in the main, contrasted with a conniving, spiteful and yet … entrancing stubborn, gutsy and conniving anti-heroine. I was reminded of all this once again, on reading this recent essay – by another woman and writer, similarly conflicted.