Alfred said he owes more than $125,000 for his degrees in theater when he’s not even working in that field.
“I work at a call center, and I make $10 an hour,” he said. “It’s surreal. I feel like a loser.”
I continue to think that academia is the next big bubble waiting to pop.
[Mid-afternoon update]
Another reason to think that college degrees are a bubble waiting to pop: a goodly amount of the email spam I get is hawking them, with subjects like “Get the degree you need,” and “Nominate for the degree” (what in the world does that even mean? I’ve never heard of “nominating” for a degree). The latest one is “Get any degree you want.” If that doesn’t devalue the notion of a degree, I don’t know what does.
Government ministers can’t agree on the best way to take money from their own citizens, give it to an opaque, above-the-law organization, and yet still control it; because, of course, with all that money comes power. Negotiators are skittish about how they can ensure that the money pledged will actually be paid into the pot, and if it does, who gets to dole out the funds. Everybody wants a piece of it, but nobody trusts anybody.
Well, they shouldn’t.
Unfortunately, as he notes, this is only a temporary setback. The leftists will regroup, and make other attempts in the future.
We now have substantial evidence, from several independent sources, that the data used as the basis for the IPCC report has been adjusted in undocumented ways, and those adjustments account for nearly all the warming we are told has been caused by humans.
The manufactured consensus continues to fall apart.
Given all this manipulation and cherry-picking, you should ignore the press releases that will undoubtedly be coming from NOAA (when they return from snowy, cold Copenhagen), NASA, and Hadley about how this has been among the warmest years, and how the last decade was the warmest on record.
I guess that Heidi Cullen will be calling for the former head of meteorology of her employer to be “decertified.”
One has to admire the heartless indifference of the climate-change jet-set in the VIP enclosure to a lifelong toady like Borenstein. The rest of us, though, might draw the conclusion that, even if you think it a good idea to transfer trillions of dollars from the functioning part of the world to a transnational bureaucracy in an attempt to recalibrate the very heavens, these chaps might not be the ones you’d want running it.
But somehow, that thought never seems to occur to them.
While the final manifest remained in flux late yesterday, it was said to include more than two dozen members of Congress, several spouses and committee staffers.
Rep. Charles Rangel (D-Harlem) was among those planning to go because of his duties as chairman of the House Ways & Means Committee, a staffer told The Post.
“We all know that Charlie Rangel is a big fan of subsidizing his vacation with taxpayer money, but the truly offensive aspect of this is Nancy Pelosi’s decision to bring the corrupt Harlem Democrat along for the ride,” said Republican spokesman Ken Spain.
You’d think that an event like Kyopenhagen would be an excellent place to set an example of doing a conference via teleconferencing. As Glenn says, I’ll believe it’s a crisis when the people who keep telling us it’s a crisis start to act like it is.
“If you are asking me personally, I have not been a big fan of manned expeditions to outer space in terms of safety and cost. But people could make the case – technology is always changing … and that could change depending on the technology,” she said today in a press conference with regional reporters.
I don’t think that safety is that big an issue, though apparently the body politic insists that it is (which is why we make so little progress in opening the frontier). But she’s dead on. The current plan makes no fiscal sense whatsoever, but with a change in technology (e.g., orbital infrastructure), it could be improved dramatically. Of course, it would also involve not just a change in technology, but more importantly, a change in philosophy, from a government command-and-control space program to one much more attuned to market incentives and private initiative. Somehow, I suspect that Nancy will be much less interested in that…
Anyway, it’s a shame that the Augustine panel couldn’t put a stake through the heart of the money-sucking heavy-lift myth. But I’d be happy to attempt to persuade Madam Speaker (assuming that she’s sincere…OK…OK……..OK…………OK, you can stop laughing now) that there are better ways to go.
…science has more epistemic depth than most of us can cope with. That water quenches thirst and puts out fires, I can confirm by experience. That it is composed of hydrogen molecules bonded to oxygen molecules by electromagnetic forces, I take on trust. “What the deuce is it to me?” I take it on trust because water’s real useful (see above). I’d likely be skeptical about the hydrogen/oxygen business if it were detached from the thirst-quenching and fire-extinguishing. It sounds improbable on the face of it, and one can easily think up folkish objections, of the kind that creationists make against evolution. (Hydrogen’s highly flammable. If there’s hydrogen in water, why isn’t water flammable? Etc., etc.)
When unmoored from utility, abstract ideas have to appeal to the human mind on their merits; and the human mind is so structured that the only abstract ideas it regards as having merit are those that concord with the “naïve duality” that is our default metaphysic — “medium-sized dry goods” being acted on by human wills, or by invisible spirits possessed of human-like wills. That’s as much epistemic depth as most of us can handle. Abstract ideas at odds with that schema just irritate us. And of course, an abstract idea widely held among people we dislike for personal, social, or tribal reasons, is doubly unappealing.
When the science has as powerful real-world implications as climate “science” (sorry, it’s hard to say it without scare quotes at this point) does, it must be trusted much more than it currently deserves to be, based on the behavior of its ostensible practioners.
