Happy Meal Time for US Students

Debt, Democracy, Economy, Education, Elections, Republicans, Socialism, Welfare

“Happy Meal Time for US Students” is my new column. Here is an excerpt:

“Barack Obama has promised America’s miseducated Millenials to keep the student-loan bubble from bursting. Campaigning in Iowa, the president vowed to keep college affordable, because, like every other welfare and warfare program, it “is at the heart of who we are.”

Interest rates for Federal Stafford Loans are set to double from 3.4 percent to 6.8 percent, on July 1. You just know how bad things are when a socialized financial market like student loans attempts to correct itself. Nevertheless, if the glut of miseducation is to be curbed, higher interest rates are healthy.

Why the president’s promise? The Twenty-Sixth Amendment, smuggled into the Constitution by statute, artificially swelled the ranks of Democratic voters by millions of eighteen-, nineteen-, and twenty-year-olds. While they don’t work for a living, youngsters get to vote for dibs on the livelihood of those who do.

It’s Happy Meal time for the nation’s students….”

Read the complete column, “Happy Meal Time for US Students.”

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UPDATE II: Racial Rogering?

Celebrity, Homeland Security, Race, Racism, Terrorism

Amassed is a critical mass of images in which TSA workers, very often members of a protected species (a minority), are feeling up and humiliating white Americans. My naive, liberal-minded readers insist that absolutely no racial animus is involved in the ongoing rogering at the nation’s airports. Yet not one of these readers has risen to the challenge. And it is this:

Send on footage of TSA agents [black or white] frisking black sisters, black tots, and elderly and crippled black old ladies. We understand probabilities. Blacks, at 12 percent of the population, represent a smaller subset of travelers than whites. But nobody has shown me that, when they travel, blacks too are subjected to the same violative searches by the many brothers and sister of the TSA as are whites.

The latest famous invertebrate to subject himself to this ritual is actor George Clooney.

MINORITY MOLESTER. Parents deliver a gorgeous little girl into the arms of another “minority” molester, who chooses to touch the child inappropriately. The parents look on—and are interviewed about it—instead of walking off. Where is Bill O’Reilly on “The Children”? The news anchor, idiot that she is, mouths that the TSA is following protocol, doing what she must. But this molester has a choice. She does not have to choose this tiny little child as her plaything.

UPDATE I: Weeping four-year-old girl accused of carrying a GUN by TSA officers after she hugged her grandmother while passing through security.

UPDATE II: “Family Misses Flight After TSA Gives Pat-Down To Girl With Cerebral Palsy.”.

As a mother—as a human being with a heart—it is particularly hard seeing children subjected to the cruelty of strangers. Watching footage of the kids down whose miniature trousers TSA goons have been reaching is heartbreaking.

As I advised in ‘It’s Hard Out Here for a Pimp,’ “Footage of the victims is everywhere, but the agents—the stars in these horror films—remain nameless and faceless. Name, shame, and dissociate from them.”

UPDATE III: Experience Revered (Scientific Second Coming)

China, Etiquette, Intelligence, Outsourcing, Race, Racism, Technology

“How many grey hairs and no-hairs are in the group?” That, I am told, is a standard inquiry Taiwanese engineers make about their American counterparts in hardware engineering. Unlike their youth-worshiping American colleagues, the Chinese know that the presence of “grey hairs and no-hairs” in the collaborating high-tech group means that problems will be solved. Black hairs are unlikely to do much more than talk a good game.

The Chinese respect experience, and for good reason. It’s a fact of life that experience, so often discounted in the American workforce for fresh-faced fools, gets things done, as it has grappled with problems for longer than inexperience.

UPDATE I: Contemplationist: You might wish to refer to the post. I spoke very specifically about hardware engineers being mostly older (naturally, the field is more demanding, aka less “fun,” and thus draws fewer Millennials). However, even your exuberant, MTV-type assessment of the software field is likely also refutable, colored by a few high-profile personalities and celebrities.

UPDATE II: Contemplationist is confusing a science fair with the work place where real design is done; where the playthings that keep America’s young, twittering twits’ brainwaves from flatlining are designed. My own sources, as some of you know, work deep in the belly of the beast that makes the gadgets that Contemplationist is vaporizing about. What Contemplationist seems to be describing resembles the science fair CNN’s Soledad O’Brien once attended, where American kids, hopped-up on self-esteem, were pressing buttons, and creaming in showy enthusiasm. The “designs” they were praised to the heavens for amounted to cheap, made-in-China circuits, purchased online and stuck into cool-looking “robots.” Of course, from Soledad’s descriptions you’d think this was some kind of scientific Second Coming.

Color me skeptical.

UPDATED III (April 27): Generation Jobless.

UPDATE IV (1/1/021): Old White Guys.

This is news? The Chinese, unlike the American competition, know that the best engineers are older White Men. Nokia’s mobile division, dumped by Microsoft, was vacuumed up by … ? And who invented the cool stuff that launched America as an industrial might?

Assange Makes Lamestream Run for Cover

libertarianism, Media, Neoconservatism, Political Philosophy, Propaganda, Russia, Socialism, The State

It is no contest: RT leads the way with gritty broadcasting. RT does what a broadcaster should do; challenge the powers that be and probe every aspect of the story. Yes, the angle pursued is more often left-libertarian than paleo, but RT is also less statist than American mainstream media. (And they happen to feature my own paleolibertarian column, which takes courage too.)

As the talented Gayane Chichakyan has noted, Julian Assange’s new RT program is making the American mainstream nuttier than normal. Chichakyan has editorialized about mainstream’s protest against letting Assange loose on air—Bill O’Reilly, Megyn Kelly, Glenn Beck, Ed Schultz (who recommended death to Assange); all were apoplectic. (On The Other Channels, we’re accustomed to the wilderness of women reporters—Don Lemon, Anderson Cooper, Erin Burnett, Tamron Toots Hall, etc.)

Gayane hinted that the malfunctioning media’s objection to more of a variety in opinion seems to have at its goal the further closing of the already atherosclerotic American mind.

In any event, Assange is sure shaking things up, starting with an interview with Hezbollah leader Sayyid Nasrallah.

Next Assange refereed repartee between David Horowitz, whom he described as “a radical right-wing Zionist,” and “Slavoj Zizek, a Slovenian sociologist, philosopher and former anti-communist dissident, who turned communist.” (Yes, “Saying ‘I’m a Socialist’ = Saying ‘I’m a Massive idiot.'”)

I was disappointed that Mr. Horowitz was described as of the “radical right wing.” He himself would cop to neoconservatism.