Home » Posts tagged 'college'

Tag Archives: college

You deserve a realistic account of the economy you’re joining.

Dear high school graduates: please glance at these charts before buying into the conventional life-course being promoted by the status quo.

Here’s the summary: the status quo is pressuring you to accept its “solutions”: borrow mega-bucks to attend college, then buy a decaying bungalow or hastily constructed stucco box for $800,000 in a “desirable” city, pay sky-high income and property taxes on your earnings, and when the stress of all these crushing financial burdens ruins your health, well, we’ve got meds to “help” you–lots of meds at insane price points paid for by insurance– if you have “real” insurance without high deductibles, of course.

Here’s the truth the status quo marketers don’t dare acknowledge: every one of these conventional “solutions” only makes the problem worse. Student loan debt only makes your life harder, not easier, as the claimed “value” of a college degree is based on the distant past, not the present. The economy is changing fast and the conventional “solutions” no longer match the new realities. But don’t expect anyone profiting from the predatory profiteering higher-education cartel to admit this.

The high cost of housing isn’t “solved” by buying in at the top of an unprecedented bubble. Buying into bubbles only makes the problem worse, for all bubbles eventually pop.

The “solution” to crushing levels of debt is not to borrow more just to prop up a rotten, corrupt, dysfunctional and self-serving status quo. In effect, the young generations are being groomed to be the hosts for the parasitic classes that feed on young taxpayers, student loan debt-serfs, young buyers of bubble-priced housing, unaffordable sickcare “insurance” and all the rest of the status quo “solutions.”

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Is Free Speech in the US Doomed?

November 9, 2017

Is Free Speech in the US Doomed?

To understand why an idea should be rejected first requires that the idea be understood.

Crowds of students gathered at the University of California-Berkeley in September armed with protest signs and chanting, “Speech is violence! We will not be silent!” Who were these students so passionately protesting against? Surely it would have to be someone as vile as neo-Nazi Richard Spencer or at least as controversial as alt-right darling Milo Yiannopoulos.

Who decides what speech constitutes violence?

In reality, it was conservative commentator Ben Shapiro – a far cry from a literal neo-Nazi – who inspired protesters to gather on campus with a rallying cry that equates speech with violence. That sentiment is a dangerous one and it is quickly gaining popularity.

When You Call Speech Violence

The problem with conflating “hate” speech with violence is manifold. For one, hate speech is subjective. Who decides what speech constitutes violence? If the answer is the government, then civil liberties will be in immediate danger, as it stands to reason that the government will crackdown on any speech is deems violent or dangerous. Consider how the government responded to the civil rights movement in the ‘50s and ‘60s.

“If utterances of speech are truly violence, then government can ban them as criminal conduct, just as we prohibit other forms of private violence,” Josh Craddock, the editor-in-chief of the Harvard Journal of Law & Public Policy argued in an August op-ed for the National Review.

Another problem with equating words with violence is that it inspires physical violence to counteract it. Force is often justified when the threat of physical harm is imminent, so it stands to reason that force can be used to prevent hateful speech in a world where violence and speech are one and the same.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Good Little Maoists

November 2, 2015

Good Little Maoists

Sometimes societies just go batshit crazy. For ten years, 1966 to 1976, China slid into the chaotic maw of Mao Zedong’s “cultural revolution.” A youth army called the Red Guard was given license to terrorize authorities all over the nation — teachers, scientists, government officials, really just about anyone in charge of anything. They destroyed lives and families and killed quite a few of their victims. They paralyzed the country with their persecutions against “bourgeois elements” and “capitalist roaders,” reaching as deep into the top leadership as Deng Xiaoping, who was paraded in public wearing a dunce-cap, but eventually was able to put an end to all the insanity after Mao’s death.

America’s own cultural revolution has worked differently. It was mostly limited to the hermetically-sealed hot-house world of the universities, where new species of hierophants and mystagogues were busy constructing a crypto-political dogma aimed at redefining status arrangements among the various diverse ethnic and sexual “multi-cultures” of the land.

There is no American Mao, but there are millions of good little Maoists all over America bent on persecuting anyone who departs from a party line that now dominates the bubble of campus life. It’s a weird home-grown mixture of Puritan witch-hunting, racial paranoia, and sexual hysteria, and it comes loaded with a lexicon of jargon — “micro-aggression,” “trigger warnings,” “speech codes,” etc — designed to enforce uniformity in thinking, and to punish departures from it.

At a moment in history when the US is beset by epochal problems of economy, energy, ecology, and foreign relations, campus life is preoccupied with handwringing over the hurt feelings of every imaginable ethnic and sexual group and just as earnestly with the suppression of ideological trespassers who don’t go along with the program of exorcisms.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Rutgers University Warns Students – “There is No Such Thing as Free Speech”

August 27, 2015

Rutgers University Warns Students – “There is No Such Thing as Free Speech”

Ironically, U.S. college campuses are rapidly becoming the least free, most censored places in the country. Many people have commented on this, including high profile, enormously talented comedians such as Chris Rock and Jerry Seinfeld. In fact, Chris Rock was so appalled thathe stopped playing colleges because audiences had become “too conservative” Before getting all bent out of shape, this is what he meant:

Not in their political views — not like they’re voting Republican — but in their social views and their willingness not to offend anybody. Kids raised on a culture of “We’re not going to keep score in the game because we don’t want anybody to lose.” Or just ignoring race to a fault. You can’t say “the black kid over there.” No, it’s “the guy with the red shoes.” You can’t even be offensive on your way to being inoffensive.

Although I’ve touched upon this subject before, I haven’t given it nearly the amount of attention it deserves. That said, I would suggest rereading a powerful post published earlier this summer, A Professor Speaks Out – How Coddled, Hyper Sensitive Undergrads are Ruining College Learning. Here’s an excerpt:

Things have changed since I started teaching. The vibe is different. I wish there were a less blunt way to put this, but my students sometimes scare me — particularly the liberal ones.

I once saw an adjunct not get his contract renewed after students complained that he exposed them to “offensive” texts written by Edward Said and Mark Twain. His response, that the texts were meant to be a little upsetting, only fueled the students’ ire and sealed his fate. That was enough to get me to comb through my syllabi and cut out anything I could see upsetting a coddled undergrad, texts ranging from Upton Sinclair to Maureen Tkacik — and I wasn’t the only one who made adjustments, either.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Global Youth Unemployment Hits 35 Million As Recent Grads Lean On Parents

May 27, 2015

Global Youth Unemployment Hits 35 Million As Recent Grads Lean On Parents

We’ve documented the pitiable plight of America’s recent college graduates on a number of occasions over the last several months. The Class of 2015 is officially the most heavily-indebted graduating class in the history of US higher education, as each student will leave college with an average debt load of more than $35,000. These proud new graduates will enter a job market where they’ll quickly discover that the idea of a US economic ‘recovery’ is, as Steve Wynn recently put it, “a complete dream”. In fact, high unemployment rates among recent graduates was recently cited by Moody’s as a contributing factor to the ratings agency’s decision to place some $3 billion in student loan-backed ABS on review. This state of affairs is made all the more perilous by the fact that nearly half of college graduates only manage to land a low-wage job which, as the OECD has recently shown, likely won’t pay enough to allow one’s family to subsist above the poverty line.

Now, the same OECD is out with a new report which looks at the world’s youth unemployment problem in an effort to determine why it is that 35 million people between the ages of 16 and 29 are jobless. Spoiler alert: it turns out $35,000 doesn’t buy a very good education.

From the OECD:

More than 35 million young people, aged 16-29, across OECD countries are neither employed nor in education or training (NEET). Overall, young people are twice as likely as prime-age workers to be unemployed.

The OECD Skills Outlook 2015 says that around half of all NEETs in the OECD are out of school and not looking for work and are likely to have dropped off the radar of their country’s education, social, and labour market systems (ZH: recall the case of America’s “vanishing worker”)

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Tag Archives: college

Content

Post categories

Economic Links

Energy/Resource Links

Environmental Links

Geopolitical Links

Liberty Links

News Links

Other Links

Survival Skills

Post Archives by Category

Latest Posts