Category Archives: Education

Business, Economics, Education, Media Criticism, Political Commentary

Lessons From The Battle Of BlogCon 2011

14 Comments

The Occumorons deserve derision:

…we learned that their personal hygiene leaves much to be desired – like, well, personal hygiene. We learned that their concept of private property is shaky at best; radio host Tony Katz hilariously schooled one shaggy gentleman on the air at length about who owned a particular chair the Occupier attempted to occupy. And we learned that they wear Guy Fawkes masks not because of any particular affinity for the noted radical Catholic terrorist but because some guy wore it in the movie V For Vendetta and it was apparently a really bitchin’ movie.

These are not deep thinkers.

But the most important lesson is that the Occupiers are a joke; they are nothing but coddled, Potemkin protesters who collapse at the first sign of resistance.

These clowns have been treated with kid gloves by gutless (or even sympathetic) politicians from Zuccotti Park to the Port of Oakland. They’ve been allowed to live in filth, dominate public spaces and generally descend into a festering petri dish of social, criminal and epidemiological pathologies by cowardly mayors and other enablers unwilling to do the most basic job of any government leader and keep order.

The mainstream media adores them, viewing them as advancing their shared left-wing agenda while also recalling the activist Sixties of legend. And, of course, the media helpfully covers up the ever-growing roster of outrages perpetrated by these nimrods. No accountability there. Even the cops are required to treat these geniuses with professional respect.

It’s been all up-twinkles for them – until now.

Not to paint a couple of botched protests as the Battle of Stalingrad, but when these idiots rushed into the midst of the assembled conservative new media folks gathered at BlogCon 2011, it was about the first time anyone ever took these cretins on en masse.

They ran into an impenetrable wall of mockery, and they had no clue what to do. They folded like a house of stinky cards.

The foundation of the success of the Occupiers is the tacit agreement by the elite to treat them with respect, to take their incoherent assemblage of bad ideas seriously, and to ignore the fact that the emperor’s new clothes are dirty, clichéd and have Che’s mug emblazoned on them.

The BlogCon folks didn’t.

They did not play along. They showed no respect. Instead, they went on the offense, kept on the offense, and turned the Occupiers’ strengths against them. It was awesome.

Read the whole report.

[Monday morning update]

“The whole world is laughing.”

[Bumped]

Business, Economics, Education, Media Criticism, Political Commentary, Science And Society

The Penn State Cover-Ups

1 Comment

It wasn’t just child molestation:

Although State Senator Piccola had written to Penn State President Spanier asking him to ensure that “the university must deploy its fullest resources to conduct an investigation of this case”, the Inquiry Committee decided that the investigation committee should not investigate three of the four charges “synthesized” by the inquiry committee and, as a result, despite the request of Piccola and others, no investigation was ever carried out Penn State on any of the key issues e.g the “trick… to hide the decline”, Mann’s role in the email deletion enterprise organised by Phil Jones or the failure to report adverse data which the House Energy and Commerce Committee had asked about (but not investigated by the NAS panel, whose terms of reference were sabotaged by Ralph Cicerone, President of NAS).

This latest malfeasance in Not-So-Happy Valley makes the whitewash of Michael Mann look even less credible.

Business, Economics, Education, Political Commentary

The Occupiers

5 Comments

…are blaming the wrong people:

It’s not the greedy Wall Street bankers who destroyed these people’s hopes. It’s the virtueocracy itself. It’s the people who constructed a benefit-heavy entitlement system whose costs can no longer be sustained. It’s the politicians and union leaders who made reckless pension promises that are now bankrupting cities and states. It’s the socially progressive policy-makers in the U.S. who declared that everyone, even those with no visible means of support, should be able to own a home with no money down, courtesy of their government. In Canada, it’s the social progressives who assure us we can keep on consuming all the health care we want, even as the costs squeeze out other public goods.

The Occupiers are right when they say our system of wealth redistribution is broken. But they’re wrong about what broke it. The richest 1 per cent are not exactly starving out the working poor. (In the U.S., half all income sent to Washington is redistributed to the elderly, sick and disabled, or to those who serve them, and nearly half the country lives in a household that’s getting some sort of government benefit.) The problem is, our system redistributes the wealth from young to old, and from middle-class workers in the private sector to inefficient and expensive unions in the public sector.

Among the biggest beneficiaries of this redistribution is the higher-education industry. In Canada, we subsidize it directly. In the U.S., it’s subsidized by a vast system of student loans, which have allowed colleges to jack up tuition to sky-high levels. U.S. student debt has hit the trillion-dollar mark. Both systems crank out too many sociologists and too few mechanical engineers. These days, even law-school graduates are having trouble finding work. That’s because the supply has increased far faster than the demand.

It was madness, and yet so many want to continue it.

[Update a while later]

More thoughts from Mark Steyn:

America is seizing up before our eyes: The decrepit airports, the underwater property market, the education racket, the hyper-regulated business environment. Yet curiously the best example of this sclerosis is the alleged “revolutionary” movement itself. It’s the voice of youth, yet everything about it is cobwebbed. It’s more like an open-mike karaoke night of a revolution than the real thing. I don’t mean just the placards with the same old portable quotes by Lenin et al., but also, say, the photograph in Forbes of Rachel, a 20-year-old “unemployed cosmetologist” with remarkably uncosmetological complexion, dressed in pink hair and nose ring as if it’s London, 1977, and she’s killing time at Camden Lock before the Pistols gig. Except that that’s three and a half decades ago, so it would be like the Sex Pistols dressing like the Andrews Sisters. Are America’s revolting youth so totally pathetically moribund they can’t even invent their own hideous fashion statements? Last weekend, the nonagenarian Commie Pete Seeger was wheeled out at Zuccotti Park to serenade the oppressed masses with “If I Had a Hammer.” As it happens, I do have a hammer. Pace Mr. Seeger, they’re not that difficult to acquire, even in a recession. But, if I took it to Zuccotti Park, I doubt very much anyone would know how to use it, or be able to muster the energy to do so.

Read all.

Business, Economics, Education, Mathematics, Political Commentary, Science And Society, Space

Where Have All The Chemists Gone?

9 Comments

Thoughts on STEM from Walter Russell Mead. Part of the problem is grade inflation in the softer courses and overemphasis on GPA as part of the faux credentialing of modern academics, which chases students away from real degrees and courses. And I agree completely with this comment with regards to engineering:

Engineering is difficult. And if you’re going to stay the course you really must want it in your gut with a passion not far from love. It helps if you were one of the kids who tinkered with radios or with automobiles or even blowing up “spare” stumps with strange concoctions. Experience made college easier. Those who got into it because daddy was an engineer and expected the son to be an engineer mostly didn’t make it. The fire in the belly was missing.

So what’s new today? Manufacturing in the US is a faint shadow of what it used to be. And computer aided design is doing away with the need for large teams just to build a small subassembly for a product like an airliner. You don’t need several passes trying to determine the proper airfoil for a Dreamliner. The computer performs an awful lot of the preliminary testing neatly and cleanly. The final product is then built and tested to confirm performance with little more than some computer drafting needed to tweak performance to specification. A small team can do what many larger teams did in the past.

Despite a long career in engineering I don’t recommend anybody get into engineering these days, particularly if they want to do it for the money. If you must get into engineering do it because you build things, love it, and want to understand how to build them better. Go into it because your hobby is engineering. Otherwise, don’t waste your time.

I’ve commented in the past that when I was growing up, engineering was what a lot of lower-middle class kids whose parents didn’t go to college went into as a way to step up in life, and they were the kids (mostly boys) who tinkered with radios and cars (my uncle was in this class). I think in the eighties, a lot of young women who were good at math steered into it, post-lib, but many of them didn’t have a natural affinity for it. But no one should go into it only with the expectation of financial reward — as other commenters note, most engineers who do really well financially go into management or become entrepreneurs.

I would also note that one of the things that drives New Space, and it’s dramatically lower costs, isn’t just the difference in incentives and business structure, but the fact that the tools available allow small teams to do what large ones used to.

[Update a few minutes later]

This is a good comment, too:

Being an engineer for over 50 years, I note the difference between the liberal arts and engineering grading systems. As was stated to me by Dr. R. F. Mehl, the engineering program does not grade on the curve. It uses real numbers. If you are driving cown the highway, you don’t want to cross a bridge built by an engineer that was graded on the curve. Grading an engineer on the curve can cause disasters later. However, grading a liberal arts student on the curve can only cause a social disaster like Obama. And the unintended result is that the liberal arts person feels so good about him/herself that they can’t be corrected.

Just like Obama.

[Late morning update]

Heh. “Hey, my major is ‘real,’ too.” It’s hard to tell initially whether or not it’s satire, but it becomes more clear as you get further into it.

Business, Economics, Education, Media Criticism, Political Commentary

“Change” and Marxism

3 Comments

Some thoughts:

In my other life, when I was national security adviser to Communist Romania’s President Nicolae Ceausescu, I wrote the lyrics of his ode to “change.” Ceausescu pretended that his predecessor had devastated the country, and he pledged to change that change. In those days I heard that ode to change a thousand times, and today I am stunned by its similarity with the Democratic Party’s “change.”

I’m not.