My thoughts on the pre-school lunch confiscation, over at PJMedia.
Category Archives: Social Commentary
Be Careful What You Wish For
Deroy Murdock follows up on my piece on rights for me but not for thee, pointing out that ObamaCare is a double-edged sword:
Imagine, as Jonah does, that Rick Santorum is elected president and becomes the reincarnation of Cotton Mather, just as Nancy Pelosi probably fears as she lays her coiffed head on her high-threadcount pillows every night. Imagine further that instead of repealing Obamacare, the former GOP senator from Pennsylvania decided to keep this law in place and modify it along much more traditionalist, even puritanical, lines.
Santorumcare could involve — say — a federally mandated, five-day waiting period before women could have abortions. This parallels the original five-day interlude that potential firearms buyers faced under the Brady Law. How could the Left object to that?
How about a requirement that every American who receives free condoms from any federally subsidized health center first must receive 30 minutes of mandatory abstinence counseling?
And why not a rule that those who visit Gay Men’s Health Crisis cannot accept any services until after completing a two-day course on gay conversion, so that they can be “cured” of their homosexuality?
I seriously doubt that President Santorum (or President Brownback or President Palin) would do such things, but then I never envisioned President Obama ordering free birth control for any and every adult female who wanted it — regardless of income — and paid for under federal orders by health insurers, over the objections of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops.
Actually, I think that was pretty predictable.
Are Neanderthals Prepared For Modern Life?
I agree that it’s not obvious that they are any less so than Homo Sapiens sapiens. It is an interesting question as to whether cloning one would be ethical, though.
Racial Discrimination In Medical Schools
This is a problem for at least two reasons (one of them is that it is illegal, yet they continue to do it). But as the commenters indicate, it’s also a result of a lack of competition in the medical profession in general, because the industry has captured the regulators.
[Update a while later]
Link was missing, fixed now. Sorry.
The Artist
Lileks loved the movie.
Free Divers
For the record, I think that these people are nuts. But it’s a good example of a recreation that is very hazardous, but that people are allowed to engage in without federal regulators looking over their shoulders. Why shouldn’t the same be true for spaceflight at this stage of the technology? I think that any of the serious vehicles currently under development (i.e., SS2, Lynx, Armadillo whatever) will be far safer than free diving or extreme mountain climbing.
[Late evening update]
Bad link, fixed now, sorry…
How Conservatives Suck
Bill Whittle counts the ways.
From Social Upheaval
…is great art made:
It is with the velocity of a giant squid and the sprawl of its erogenous arms that with water-wheels the leverage in any musculoskeletal appendage can move into positions within the time it would take the engine of filaments to accelerate the psychic mass of bodily understanding and construction for such a displacement to continue in different venues and as multiple in purpose as the simple machine of our vessel will allow toward the disappearance of a nexus like in infinite mirror games but with the ability to count each movement of the progression as it acts in mechanical, yet organic, jerking behind the dreamlike animals with their pink illusions that roll their wet bodies into our delicate systems
Yes, those college degrees were totally worth the money. Though I suspect that pharmaceuticals may have played a role.
Sesame-Street Jurisprudence
The Disastrous State Of Higher Education
This isn’t really news, but it’s depressing anyway, indicative of a massive failure of government policy and misincentives:
What the study found is not the least bit surprising. Students who learned little in college (as evidenced by scoring in the bottom quintile on the College Learning Assessment) were three times as likely to be unemployed as students who scored in the top quintile, twice as likely to be living at home, and somewhat more likely to have run up credit card debts.
Those findings throw cold water on the smiley face idea that going to college is necessarily a good “investment.” Even some of the top graduates were unemployed and living with their parents and a much higher number of low-performing graduates were. Unfortunately, the study did not seek to find out how many of those graduates were “underemployed” in jobs that high schoolers can do. (Perhaps no further evidence on that is necessary, though, in view of this study.)
Another particularly interesting finding from “Documenting Uncertain Times” is that employers pay little attention to what students majored in and how good their academic records were. The authors write, “That nearly two-thirds of these recent graduates’ employers did not require them to submit transcripts speaks to the perceived limited value and trust employers currently place in this traditional record of achievement in higher education.” If, as I have argued for years, many employers are simply using the presence of a college degree as a screening device, that behavior makes perfect sense.
A company that, for example, needs to hire someone to handle a car-rental desk might insist on a college degree as evidence of trainability, but not think it worth the added cost of checking to see how he or she did in college. Whatever education might have been absorbed is irrelevant; all that matters is the credential itself.
A credential becoming worth less and less. This all started when it became difficult for employers to test job applicants. As noted there, if we can’t get government out of the student loan business, which is a large part of the problem, we need to force the schools to put some skin in the loan game themselves, because as the situation is currently, they’re not punished for their failure to educate, but rewarded.