Tag Archives: idiocy

The “Business” of Playing God

21 Sunday Apr 2019

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This may be the final article I link to from “Business” Insider (or, maybe in the future, Business Insidious):

We’re altering the climate so severely that we’ll soon face apocalyptic consequences. Here are 11 last-ditch ways we could hack the planet to reverse that trend.

Geoengineering is a term that refers to technology that can alter Earth’s natural cycles to cool down the planet. It’s being increasingly discussed as a potential way to address climate change.

Putting mirrors in space, capturing carbon dioxide, and seeding clouds with particles are all ways of manipulating weather or the atmosphere.

But some scientists and politicians think geoengineering could damage the planet or lead to war.

Here are 11 strategies researchers have put forth to hack the planet and combat climate change.

Eleven ways, that they don’t even understand, to stop a problem that doesn’t exist. As always, this crap is about fostering communism and nothing else.

The apocalypse is still just around the next corner. But! Now the people that told us aerosols were destroying the planet via the skies, want to flood the sky with aerosol to save the planet. This is more religious than scientific and the priests, acolytes, and followers are utterly insane.

Ms. Woodward and her “experts” are right about one thing – with or without Marxist meddling, there will be war. That’s where the apocalyptic consequences come from.

Investigate Facebook and Zuck for Theft

19 Friday Apr 2019

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Inadvertent? Right. Here’s the Farceberg outrage of the day minute: 1.5 million accounts robbed of email contacts.

Facebook harvested the email contacts of 1.5 million users without their knowledge or consent when they opened their accounts.

Since May 2016, the social-networking company has collected the contact lists of 1.5 million users new to the social network, Business Insider can reveal. The Silicon Valley company said the contact data was “unintentionally uploaded to Facebook,” and it is now deleting them.

The revelation comes after pseudononymous security researcher e-sushi noticed that Facebook was asking some users to enter their email passwords when they signed up for new accounts to verify their identities, a move widely condemned by security experts. Business Insider then discovered that if you entered your email password, a message popped up saying it was “importing” your contacts without asking for permission first.

At the time, it wasn’t clear what was happening – but on Wednesday, Facebook disclosed to Business Insider that 1.5 million people’s contacts were collected this way and fed into Facebook’s systems, where they were used to improve Facebook’s ad targeting, build Facebook’s web of social connections, and recommend friends to add.

Why do the police always take Zuck’s word about these “inadvertent” mistakes? Smells kind of like theft to me. 1.5 million consecutive 1-year prisons sentences should do as punishment.

Anyhow, I’ll bet it was more than 1.5 million and it was more than just email contacts. If, for some strange, low-IQ reason, you’re still on FB, do at least check your “secret” file to find out exactly what they admit they have on you.

Strike that… If you’re still on the Zuckbook, then just keep looking at those pics and “reading” all those worthy Russian trolling attempts. You don’t need privacy nor need you be worried about anyone invading it; small minds aren’t worth reading.

The Corrosive BS of American Academia

21 Monday Jan 2019

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As seen and chronicled by an American academic, Prof. Christian Smith of Notre Dame’s School of Sociology:

I have had nearly enough bullshit. The manure has piled up so deep in the hallways, classrooms, and administration buildings of American higher education that I am not sure how much longer I can wade through it and retain my sanity and integrity.

Even worse, the accumulated effects of all the academic BS are contributing to this country’s disastrous political condition and, ultimately, putting at risk the very viability and character of decent civilization. What do I mean by BS?

BS is the university’s loss of capacity to grapple with life’s Big Questions, because of our crisis of faith in truth, reality, reason, evidence, argument, civility, and our common humanity.

BS is the farce of what are actually “fragmentversities” claiming to be universities, of hyperspecialization and academic disciplines unable to talk with each other about obvious shared concerns.

BS is the expectation that a good education can be provided by institutions modeled organizationally on factories, state bureaucracies, and shopping malls — that is, by enormous universities processing hordes of students as if they were livestock, numbers waiting in line, and shopping consumers.

BS is universities hijacked by the relentless pursuit of money and prestige, including chasing rankings that they know are deeply flawed, at the expense of genuine educational excellence (to be distinguished from the vacuous “excellence” peddled by recruitment and “advancement” offices in every run-of-the-mill university).

BS is the ideologically infused jargon deployed by various fields to stake out in-group self-importance and insulate them from accountability to those not fluent in such solipsistic language games.

…

Read on and on about what BS is in higher “education.” Understand that, “the long-term corrosive effects on politics and culture can also be repaired only over the long term, if ever. There are no quick fixes here. So I do not speak in hyperbole by saying that our accumulated academic BS puts at risk decent civilization itself.”

Hope remains:

… We will need people with the capacity to retrieve and revitalize the best of higher education’s past and restructure it organizationally in ways that are most effective in the future.

History gives us some reason to hope that creative women and men will, over time, develop fruitful experiments and build new institutions that lead to a reblossoming of excellent higher education worthy of the name and help revitalize culture and political life. …

I’d like to help with the retrieval and revitalization. In addition to posts like this, a very few of you know of my ongoing covert work in this area. And, boy, does it need work.

Amazing Amerikan Woman Tries to Change World, Fails Horribly

21 Saturday Apr 2018

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Horribly. Miserably. This story is beyond sad; simply horrifying:

How this Midwestern mom ended up married to an ISIS sniper

Yahoo! ran a representative picture right up front (but don’t be fooled):

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A pretty good, almost Madison Avenue worthy start, but … read on:

Samantha Sally spoke to CNN about how her “romantic” second marriage to Moroccan-born husband Moussa Elhassani resulted in an unexpected move to Syria in 2014. Once there, Elhassani became violent and joined ISIS as a sniper.

“Before he would spoil me,” the 32-year-old American said. “We were very much in love. The romance never left. As soon as we came here, it changed. I was a dog. I didn’t have any choice. He was extremely violent. And there was nothing I could do about it. Nothing.”

…

The family ended up settling in Raqqa, Syria, where Sally gave birth to two more children. In addition to Elhassani’s violent behavior, she was subjected to abuse from ISIS leaders, including a three-month stretch in jail while she was pregnant. Sally says that she was tortured, sexually abused, and put in solitary confinement while being accused of espionage on behalf of the U.S.

Their home life eventually included the purchase of three Yazidi slaves — two teenage females and one young boy — captured by ISIS. Both girls were raped by Elhassani, though Sally defends having them stay in her home.

“No one will ever know what it is like to watch their husband rape a 14-year-old girl,” she said. “Ever. And then she comes to you — me — after crying and I hold her and tell her it’s going to be OK. Everything is going to be fine, just be patient.

“I would never apologize for bringing those girls to my house,” she added. “They had me and I had them. And we knew that if we were just patient, we would stick together. You understand? In any other situation, they would be locked in a bedroom and fed tea every day. And the situation I was in with them, we cooked together, we cleaned together. Drank coffee together. Slept in the same room together. I was like their mother.”

Her eldest son, Matthew, was also taken advantage of and was made to appear in videos on behalf of the terrorist group. Sally’s objection to his participation resulted in a beating and two broken ribs.

Things changed when Elhassani was killed in a drone strike in 2017. Sally and her family eventually left Raqqa and were detained soon after. They remain in custody and wait for U.S. officials determine whether her affiliation with ISIS merits jail time.

Sally, meanwhile, is hopeful that she and her four children are able to return to the U.S.

“I will do anything to get my kids back where they belong,” she said. “If I have to spend 15 years in prison, it’s better than anything here.

“Me and my kids, we talk about wanting to eat McDonald’s,” she continued. “We want to live a normal life again.”

So. Did you catch it? This was one of the most vile, racist reads I’ve seen since I don’t know when. It’s like David Duke, Robert E. Lee, and Richard Spencer conspired to write an evil, dystopian fictional plot. But, sadly, this one is all too real.

I’ll never, for the life of me, understand women like this. Living with the slanderous allegations of being a “terrorist” and of “treason” do not justify her. The insult and shame of being expected to apologize for her savage “husband’s” illicit amorous affairs is not an excuse. Nor was seeing her cockroach “husband” squashed like what he was. No excuses. None.

After experiencing the very best of diversity, an immersion class if you will – the tribal war, idiotic violence, slavery, abuse, child rapes, broken ribs, traitorous behavior, etc. – this bigot had the audacity to contrast the great good of the barbarous stone-age world with “normal life” back in America. Normal. Life. In America…

How can she shun the very cultural enrichment which will surely save Western Civilization by destroying it? It boggles the mind.

She even thinks 15 years in American prison is “better than anything [in the land of greatest pride, strength, and human dignity].”

Leave her in jail where she is. That’s where she belongs. The kids can come back. Maybe they can share with the deplorables all the good lessons they learned living among our betters. Maybe.

We Shall Never Overcome

04 Friday Aug 2017

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Seems the Civil War just won’t go away.

In Maryland the problem isn’t the crime, the unemployment, the illiteracy, the illegitimacy, or the false sense of entitlement. No, it’s a 17th Century Coat of Arms.

“When the General Assembly in 1904 adopted a banner of this design as the state flag, a link was forged between modern-day Maryland and the very earliest chapter of the proprietorship of the Calvert family.”

But the red and white part of the flag, known as the Crossland arms, was also the design flown by Marylanders who sympathized with the South in the Civil War, according to state records.

“During the war, Maryland-born Confederate soldiers used both the red-and-white colors and the cross bottony design from the Crossland quadrants of the Calvert coat of arms as a unique way of identifying their place of birth,” the records say. “Pins in the cross bottony shape were worn on uniforms, and the headquarters flag of the Maryland-born Confederate general Bradley T. Johnson was a red cross bottony on a white field.”

During the slow process of reconciliation after the Civil War ended in Union victory in 1865, a “flag incorporating alternating quadrants of the Calvert and Crossland colors began appearing at public events” in the state.

By extension of this “logic” all state flags are Confederate in nature – all states share the same hemisphere with those former CSA states once in rebellion…

Better tear down some monuments. Riot or something. Blame someone.

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This is “racist.”

Seeing as how so many are obviously unhappy in 21st Century America, maybe it’s time they depart. To anywhere.

Television Jumps the CGI Shark

25 Tuesday Jul 2017

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For the record I did not watch the great Michael Phelps race the fake Great White. Many did – and were not happy about the spectacle.

Remember back in December 2014, when Discovery Channel hyped that a man would be eaten and then regurgitated by a giant snake on a special called “Eaten Alive?” Then that didn’t actually happen, and viewers were furious?

We bring this up because 57 minutes into Discovery’s heavily promoted Sunday night Shark Week program — in which Olympic powerhouse swimmer Michael Phelps was set to race against a great white shark — viewers heard this quote from ecologist Tristan Gutteridge, one the featured scientists:

“Clearly, we can’t put Michael in one lane and a white shark on the far lane. We’re gonna have to do a simulation.”

Hold on. So Phelps wasn’t going to actually race a shark in a TV event titled “Phelps vs. Shark: Great Gold vs. Great White”?! Why was the hour-long special billed as such?

While common sense probably could have saved any disappointment — along with preshow interviews where Phelps assured everyone that he wouldn’t really race next to a shark in open water — many viewers were not pleased.

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Yeah, it’s television, it’s all bullshark. Twitter/WP.

I did not watch, and was not disappointed, for two reasons: 1) I don’t waste time on TeeVee, and; 2) I didn’t care. When I first heard of the possibility of Phelps racing a real shark, my initial thought was, “I hope they find a shark named ‘Darwin’.”

Seems Phelps and the producers aren’t entirely stupid. Some viewers are.

I think they could have put in a real shark with a high degree of safety and a very high degree of cost. A net or plexiglass barrier would have sufficed. Such would have been too expensive, costing far more than some creative 1s and 0s in a computer.

You get what you pay for. Or what you watch.

With a very few exceptions television has been intellectually dead for decades. Anyone who spends time staring at Plato’s electronic cave wall deserves to be disappointed. And they almost uniformly are.

Batman, Fonzie, and Phelps. Who’s next?

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Twitter.

And Phelps lost…

 

Congratulations. You Elected Hilary Clinton…

07 Friday Apr 2017

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America is completely and utterly out of control. Any hopes that a Trump Presidency would reverse course or hold position have now faded away. Last night the President lobbed nearly 60 Tomahawk cruise missiles into Syria.

  • The US military fired more than 50 tomahawk missiles at al-Shayrat military airfield at 8.45pm EDT Thursday
  • Moves comes just hours after Trump said ‘something should happen’ following Tuesday’s gas-attack atrocity
  • Trump took action after more than 80 were killed and many more were injured in the Sarin poison gas attack
  • ‘Even beautiful babies were cruelly murdered in this very barbaric attack,’ he said after launching the strike
  • Russian President Vladimir Putin has issued a furious response calling airstrike an ‘illegal act of aggression’
  • US called ‘a partner of ISIS’ by al-Assad’s spokesman who said missile strikes are ‘reckless and irresponsible’
  • Trump says airfield used to store toxic weapons and was the base for the aircraft involved in the Sarin attack
  • Claims that nine were killed, and more were injured, in the strike which has severely damaged the airbase
  • US told Moscow it was launching an airstrike about 30 minutes in advance – but did not ask for permission

U.S. Navy guided-missile destroyer USS Porter (DDG 78) conducts strike operations while in the Mediterranean Sea

Bombs away, suckers… Daily Mail.

The public, those few who are somewhat awake, seems elated. As of this writing, 65+% of a Drudge poll see the action as favorable. I ask, “favorable to whom”?

Not everyone is happy. Rand Paul cautiously reminded the President that, per the Constitution, Congress is supposed to approve war. A little too late, Rand. This episode, if worth nothing else, proves definitively that the old Constitution is dead and gone. Cling at your own risk.

Nigel Farage, an early Trump supporter, cautioned:

The MEP hit out by warning that those who voted for the US president would be ‘worried’ by his retaliation.

‘I am very surprised by this. I think a lot of Trump voters will be waking up this morning and scratching their heads and saying “where will it all end?”, he said.

‘As a firm Trump supporter, I say, yes, the pictures were horrible, but I’m surprised. Whatever Assad’s sins, he is secular.’

He added: ‘Previous interventions in the Middle East have made things worse rather than better.’

Current UKIP leader, Paul Nuttal, was a bit more blunt: “The U.S. bombing of Syria last night was rash, trigger happy, nonsensical and will achieve nothing. I hoped for better.”

We all hoped for better. Hope in one hand and ….

Vox Day criticized the move:

That being said, I will certainly be disappointed if the God-Emperor makes regime change in Syria an objective of his administration, and I will continue to oppose any military involvement in the Middle East, Europe, the Ukraine, and any military activity directed against China or Russia.

The Russians are beyond livid:

“That’s it. The last remaining election fog has lifted. Instead of an overworked statement about a joint fight against the biggest enemy, Isis (the Islamic State), the Trump administration proved that it will fiercely fight the legitimate Syrian government, in a tough contradiction with international law and without UN approval, in violation of its own procedures stipulating that the Congress must first be notified of any military operation unrelated to aggression against the US. On the verge of a military clash with Russia.

“Nobody is overestimating the value of pre-election promises but there must be limits of decency.

“Beyond that is absolute mistrust. Which is really sad for our now completely ruined relations. And which is good news for terrorists.

“One more thing. This military action is a clear indication of the US President’s extreme dependency on the opinion of the Washington establishment, the one that the new president strongly criticised in his inauguration speech.

“Soon after his victory, I noted that everything would depend on how soon Trump’s election promises would be broken by the existing power machine. It took only two and a half months.”

-Dmitry Medvedev

Medvedev correctly pointed out the attack was both illegal and came within an inch of initiating a real war with a real and capable enemy.

Where to start with this???

The underlying Sarin gas attack is questionable at best. The U.S. media has taken the government’s word verbatim. Still, there is no definitive proof it happened. And, if it did happen, there’s no proof Assad was behind it. And, even if it happened and Assad is responsible, there is absolutely no American interest in the matter and nothing to be gained from intervention. It is not our damned business.

Is this what you voted for? Trump is now enacting the worst fears associated with the Clinton campaign. He’s running headlong towards war with Syria, North Korea, and maybe even Russia – in addition to ongoing actions in Pakistan, Afghanistan, Iraq, Iran, Yemen, Somalia, Sudan, Libya, and God knows where else. Madness. Sheer utter madness. I advised you all to abstain from the election. Hey, voters, this is on you!

The problem, for us, with radical Islamists, has nothing to do with their activities in their home nations. The problem is with their terrorism in our countries, like Sweden, home of the latest predictable attack.

The solution is very simple: 1) stop bothering these people in their countries, and 2) get them out of ours. Damned simple. And obviously not going to happen just yet. There must be a little more money to be given the banksters and the MIC. You voted for this.

You also voted for the jumbled, same-as-always home agenda. Trump, the businessman and outsider, is working hard to surround himself with more insiders and Wall Street criminals. He cannot marshal the idiots in the GOP, even as they hold a complete majority in D.C. No healthcare reform. No tax cuts. The wall may stall. The deportations and travel bans also stall even as easy solutions abound. A “neutral” budget with no redress of the $20 Trillion (on-books) debt nor the Fed’s funny money. Your vote wasted again.

*In fairness, the man is working to create some jobs and cut some regs. There’s that. Small things, mice among the elephants.

As Vox noted, the real war for the West will be fought in the West. The other side has been fighting for some years now, even as you’ve stared at the TeeVee. All the attacks on all the foreign nations are mere distractions. They garner easy support. Yet, few actually want to fight at home – fear of being called “racist” or something. I hear local Muslims are concerned about fictional backlash from tomorrow’s terrorist attack… The media, the SJWs, and the dullards will lend pitiful support. Madness.

None of our interventions in the Middle East and elsewhere over the past 25+ years have done anything except kill people, displace people, overrun the West with “refugees”, break things, empower terrorists, and waste money. We can’t ever win these wars because there is nothing to win or to gain. Syria is no different except that we risk war with Russia. And, that, we certainly cannot win.

All the while a real war (we must win if we are to survive) rages around us.

I love fun and games as much as the next man; I’m having a blast this Masters’s week. Yet, maybe, just maybe, it’s time to wake up and wise up.

Expect nothing but trouble (certainly no help from) the Washington-Wall Street-Fed-globohomo-MIC-media-GOP-DNC-Reagan-Bush-Clinton-Bush-Obama-Trump cabal.

Nothing. Maybe it’s time to revive that letter to Putin…

The Colossal (Predictable) Failure of the GOP

26 Sunday Mar 2017

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Glenn Harlan Reynolds accurately details the incomprehensible Republican failure and stupidity last week in D.C.

The plan to replace Obamacare with a new bill crafted by House Speaker Paul Ryan has failed, and embarrassingly so. And that failure is part and parcel of a larger failure of the Republican-led Congress to push an agenda in the new administration.

Talking to a friend at lunch not long ago, he expressed his amazement that the House and Senate leadership didn’t have bills “lined up like airplanes on a runway” ready to take off in the new year. I was surprised, too.

It’s not like the need to do something about Obamacare was a surprise. Republicans have been promising to repeal it for most of a decade. And it’s not like Obamacare was popular or successful. Premiums are rising, providers are dropping out, and costs are going up. It’s true that the Obamacare bill, pushed through on a procedural technicality that avoided a filibuster but left it impossible to fix at the time, was a mess. It’s also true that the legislation was drafted, and the regulations implementing it were designed, in part to make it hard to undo.

Nonetheless, the Republican inability to deliver a bill that could get a majority in the GOP-led House is a colossal failure, and pretty much undercuts its entire reason for being. For years the congressional GOP leadership failed to deliver on promises to constituents, and offered the excuse that it couldn’t do anything without control of the White House. Well, they’ve got that, so what’s their excuse now? And where are the bills on infrastructure, on tax reform, on free speech?

The congressional GOP’s failure to deliver on its promises is one of the things that led to the election of President Trump. Now they’re still failing. What comes next?

If history has taught us anything about Republicans, then “what comes next” is more failure. The Atlanta Falcons of politics.

Last night I caught a few minutes of Judge Jeanine Pirro of Fox – I could not turn away as she utterly skewered Paul Ryan:

Paul Ryan needs to step down as Speaker of the House.

The reason? He failed to deliver the votes on his health care bill. The one trumpeted to repeal and replace ObamaCare. The one that he had seven years to work on. The one he hid under lock and key in the basement of Congress. The one that had to be pulled to prevent the embarrassment of not having enough votes to pass.

But this bill didn’t just fail — it failed when Republicans had the House, the Senate, the White House.

And the timing? It failed within the first 70 days of President Donald Trump’s administration. A president who made replacement of ObamaCare the hallmark of his campaign. And then used valuable political capital to accomplish it.

Americans elected the one man they believed could do it. A complete outsider. Someone beholden to no one — but them.

And Speaker Ryan, you come in, with all your swagger and experience, and you sell him a bill of goods which ends up a complete and total failure. And you allow our president, in his first one hundred days, to come out of the box like that? Based on what? Your legislative expertise? Your knowledge of the arcane ins and outs of the bill writing process? Your relationships? What? Your drinks at the Hay-Adams with your pals?

Folks, I want to be clear: this is NOT on President Trump. No one expected a businessman to completely understand the nuances, the complicated ins and outs of Washington and its legislative process. How would he know which individuals upon whom he would be able to rely? Many of them, friends and establishment colleagues of Speaker Ryan.

You, on the other hand, Speaker Ryan, know very well who the 15 hard liners, the 10 moderates, and all the other ones.

Amen. No, this one is not on Trump. This one and this one alone. No more passes in the future. He’s a smart enough man to learn how the jellyfish sting. Whether he’s willing to use what he learns and whether that is enough remains to be seen.

The whole 61st (61st!!) failure to repeal ObamaCare boiled down to not getting conservative Republicans on board. Hell, as Pirro says, they were physically locked out of the process. How could anyone have expected their support? The Bill could have been passed with their help and without a single Democrat vote in favor. This is strictly a GOP problem.

Their “solution” is strict GOP stupidity. The conservatives in the “conservative” party were not consulted, then. Now, instead on trying to get them on board, the GOP and Trump are opening to the idea of bringing Democrats into the fold. I wonder what their suggestions might entail?

And the GOP is splintering. Blaming those fellow conservatives who were never invited to participate, Rep. Ted Poe is abandoning the House Freedom Caucus.

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Ted Poe / Twitter.

Despite decades of jading, I had high hopes for Trump’s Presidency. I still do though that old shade of green is creeping back into my views. If he cannot marshal this band of derelicts and losers into a solid party, then there isn’t much faith in his (their?) agenda. If that happens, one can expect similar failures on: the debt ceiling (a given no matter what); tax cuts; immigration; etc.

The whole thing starts to look like the Contract with America. Remember that stellar GOP success? Neither do I.

On that note, I will leave you with Carlin:

Another Defeat: The Elephants Struggle

25 Saturday Mar 2017

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The Republicans are the Atlanta Falcons of politics. Losers from Loserville. Early last month the real Falcons showed the sporting world how to blow a 25-point lead, insurmountable by practical standards, and lose a Super Bowl in spectacular, if typical, Atlanta fashion. Yesterday, not to be out-done, the GOP squandered control of the House, the Senate, and the White House, losing their bid to reform ObamaCare for something like the 60th time.

It’s worse really, and not just because millions actually depend on the outcome. Atlanta lost to the greatest team, coach, and quarterback in history – all striding through the second half like no team has before (or likely will after). Trump, Ryan, and Co. “lost” to a Democrat party with no clear leadership, no agenda, and no motives. Failure to internally think, plan, and communicate led the Speaker to pull the AHCA Bill just prior to a vote.

Republicans abruptly pulled their health care bill from the House floor on Friday, just minutes ahead of a planned vote, dealing a devastating blow to efforts by President Donald Trump and the GOP to repeal and replace Obamacare.

“This is a disappointing day for us,” Speaker Paul Ryan told reporters shortly after the bill was yanked. “Doing big things is hard. All of us, myself included, will need time to reflect how we got to this moment, what we could have done to do it better.”

Ryan said he told Trump around noon the White House that they didn’t have the Republican votes needed to pass the bill. “I told him that the best thing I think to do is to pull this bill and he agreed with that decision,” Ryan said.

Speaking via phone later at 3:00 p.m. EST, Trump said Democrats in the House — all of whom had planned to vote against the bill — shoulder the blame for the defeat. “Obamacare is exploding,” the president said in the Oval Office. “With no Democrat support, we couldn’t quite get there. We were just a very small number of votes short in terms of getting our bill passed.”

“I’m disappointed,” Trump said, adding, “I’m a little surprised to be honest with you.”

Welcome to Washington, Mr. Trump. The irresistible force has met the immovable object. Even the Donald’s charismatic juggernaut has limits.

A friend and I debated whether the circus clown might be a better symbol for the GOP than the noble elephant. I think I’ve found a better. The elephant is large, powerful, dangerous even. And it is a smart animal, as animals go. No relation to the GOP in the 21st Century. No, a better mascot would be the jellyfish: a brainless, spineless creature dedicating to drifting the currents and soaking up nutrients. As seemingly harmless as it is useless, it can still deliver a nasty sting to those foolish enough to associate with it. Trump feels the burning sting this weekend.

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Carlos Slim’s Blog.

In fairness, the Repubs have been working on repealing, repealing and replacing, or amending ObamaCare for seven years. Only seven. It took the Democrats over 15 years to craft the law – from Bill and Hillary’s hints in 1992-3 to Obama’s collusion with Big Insurance and the Devil in 2010. But the Dems really are stubborn like donkeys. They bide their time and plan strategically. The predictable failure of ObamaCare even fits their long-term plans for socialism.

The “conservatives” have no plans and no idea how to handle authority. Monday, they’ll be on to a similar debacle with tax cuts. However, then (or now), they will find the debt ceiling looming once again on the D.C. horizon. The debt will rise; it always does. This year promises, perhaps, some extra suspense and entertainment.

Well, as much of those things as a jellyfish can generate.

The Diminishing Value of Degrees

01 Wednesday Mar 2017

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Over the past few years I have written extensively about the joke that is modern “higher” education. I started with my own experience. The only ideas I learned in college were essentially self-taught lessons in (elective) areas that interested me (philosophy, classics, etc.). Only too late did I realize my mistake with a business major. The only things I remember from business school is that: 1) about 3% of targeted people respond to advertising campaigns, and 2) let the calculator do the amortizations.

Law school was a similar fiasco. “Government good. Government all powerful. Government give some rights. Thanks be to government for government…” Bullsh!t! on that!

Lately I’ve explored the PC circus permanently encamped on our campuses. Outside of the hard sciences there is next to no education, just indoctrination in the wonders of victimhood, white guilt, and socialism. No formal learning. Anything of value actually picked up is done so incidentally and autodidactically. And they pay big money for all this garbage.

This is how it is possible for so many to come out of four, five, seven, and eight+ year programs and know nothing – literally with the experience and mentality of seven-year-olds (along with bad, snooty attitudes and loads of debt).

People outside the ivory towers are beginning to notice the decline. And they’re reacting accordingly:

Ernst & Young, one of the UK’s biggest graduate recruiters, has announced it will be removing the degree classification from its entry criteria, saying there is “no evidence” success at university correlates with achievement in later life.

In an unprecendented move, the accountancy firm is scrapping its policy of requiring a 2:1 and the equivalent of three B grades at A-level in order to open opportunities for talented individuals “regardless of their background”.

In other words, at Ernst, a college degree may be an enhancer for some, but it is no longer a base requirement. Why? Because, as stated, there’s no longer any evidence it means anything. Time was when a degree meant you had a smart, well-read, and hard-working man on your hands. Now, it likely means you’re interviewing an SJW, know-nothing, nitwit and future HR headache, someone who understands little and will accomplish even less. Ernst is not alone in this development.

Martin Armstrong also commented on this story:

The best education has ALWAYS been an apprenticeship – not some university course taught by someone who has never practiced what they teach.
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In ancient Rome, at between nine and twelve years of age, boys from affluent families would leave their basic education behind and take up study with a grammaticus, who was a teacher that refined his students’ writing and speaking skills. They would be versed in the art of poetic analysis and taught them Greek if they did not yet know it. They would be taught logic and how to think. By this point, lower class boys would already be working as apprentices. If someone wanted to be a sculptor, he would apply to be an apprentice at a sculptor shop. Girls, both rich and poor, would be focused on making themselves attractive brides and, subsequently, capable mothers. It was the women who often ran the household.

We still have trade schools, which are regarded as less than university. Yet, our education in university was supposed to follow the Roman model of apprentice for the lower class and higher education for the upper class. But somehow, university moved beyond grammaticus and pretended to prepare someone for a skill, which the Roman system did not seek to accomplish – merely refine the character of the student.
Even economics at its beginning under Adam Smith was regarded as part of moral philosophy. Economics was not taught as a subject by itself until 1901.

From Greco-Roman through Victorian times, all trades worked through apprenticeships. All – cobblers, chimney-sweeps, sailors, lawyers, doctors, economists, teachers, masons, carpenters, manufacturers, salesmen, architects, fishermen – all of them offered apprenticeships.

Higher education, elite education, existed all throughout those times. It was intended, for those of given aptitude and circumstance, to gain a level of understanding and intellectual exposure above and beyond the ordinary – and above what was required in their chosen field of employment.

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Socrates – no degrees. Leonidas Drosis (Athens) / Wikipedia.

Today, there are a precious few institutions still in business that provide the basics of a real advanced education. Very few and very far between. We’re lucky to have them.

We’re even luckier to have the internet. Essentially 100% of the contents of a good college curriculum are available on-line and mostly for free. Any enterprising person with a basic grasp of reading and math (all that’s afforded by most “lower” schools anyway) can learn anything they like about any given subject.

Share this information with young people you might know and care about. If you, at any age, want an education, then get one. Don’t fall for the modern college/student loan slavery trap. Learn what you like, in your own time, at your own pace. And forget the degrees – there’s “no evidence” they mean anything and they are no longer golden tickets (manacles, maybe; tickets, no).