You asked how college was when I was a kid, in the late Epicene, and what I thought of schools today. Herewith an answer which I will probably post on my website as I think the matter important:
Much has changed.
Long ago, before 1965 say, college was understood to be for the intelligent and academically prepared among the young, who would one day both provide leadership for the country and set the tone of society. Perhaps ten percent, but no more than twenty percent, of high-school graduates were thought to have any business on a campus.
From the sewers they come. Anti-Trump animalia beating a supporter of Trump in San Jose. They have done the same to Sanders. Anti-Trump is legitimate. Beating up his supporters is not. Us or them.
From the Drudge Report, America’s thermometer, regarding the disruption a campaign rally for Trump:
Enough. This can’t last. If people want to demonstrate against anything at all, fine. If they detest any politician at all, fine. If they are vulgar subliterate rabble, let them be vulgar subliterate rabble where I am not. But when they run wild over and over and shut down politics, they need to be stopped, right now, with nightsticks and dogs and long jail sentences.
A country that allows a feral underclass to run unchecked, to attack and beat anyone it doesn’t like, to loot and burn and disrupt political rallies, to block highways and intimidate the citizenry, will not last. It is time to put an end to it. If we still can.
Why do so many of our young people instantly break down in tears the moment anything seriously offends them?
Have we raised an entire generation that has been so coddled and that is so spineless that it is completely incapable of dealing with the harsh realities of the modern world? At colleges and universities all over America, students are now demanding “safe spaces” where anything and everything that could possibly make them feel “uncomfortable” is banned. And “trigger warnings” are being placed on some of our great literary classics because they might cause some students to feel “unsafe” because they may be reminded of a past trauma. In this day and age, our overly coddled young people have come to expect that they should be automatically shielded from anything that could remotely be considered harmful or offensive, and as a result we now have an entire generation that is completely lacking in toughness. That may be fine as long as you can depend on Mom and Dad, but how in the world are these young men and women going to handle the difficult challenges that come with living in the real world?
Author Claire Fox has a great deal of experience dealing with these overly sensitive young people, and she has dubbed them “Generation Snowflake”…
Sad to say, you haven’t seen nothin’ yet. The world is drifting into financial entropy, and it is going to get steadily worse. That’s because the emerging stock market slump isn’t just another cyclical correction; it’s the opening phase of the end-game.
That is, the end game of the PhD Tyranny.
During the last two decades the major central banks of the world have been colonized lock, stock and barrel by Keynesian crackpots. These academic scribblers and power-hungry apparatchiks have now pushed interest rate repression, massive monetization (QE) and relentless rigging of the financial markets to the limits of sanity and beyond. Honest, market-driven price discovery is dead as a doornail.
No more proof is needed than the “matrix” below. The very thing that financial history proves, above all else, is that governments can’t be trusted to honor their debts. And that cardinal fact is supposed to be embodied in the yield.
In fact, modern welfare state democracies have a veritable fiscal death wish.
Depending on who you ask, the Millennial generation is either a lazy, entitled bunch of whiners, or they’ve been screwed by a rigged economy that doesn’t provide enough opportunities, and given false expectations of prosperity by their parents. I would argue that there is merit to both arguments, but whatever the case may be, pretty much everyone agrees that Millennials are in a difficult position in life.
Never before has a population of twenty somethings in America, been loaded with so much debt, and never before have so many of them been living at home with their parents, with no clear objective in life. Fortunately, Mike Rowe of Dirty Jobs fame has an answer to all those Millennials who were promised the moon, and told to follow their passions at all costs.
Why do so many of our young people instantly break down in tears the moment anything seriously offends them? Have we raised an entire generation that has been so coddled and that is so spineless that it is completely incapable of dealing with the harsh realities of the modern world?
At colleges and universities all over America, students are now demanding “safe spaces” where anything and everything that could possibly make them feel “uncomfortable” is banned. And “trigger warnings” are being placed on some of our great literary classics because they might cause some students to feel “unsafe” because they may be reminded of a past trauma. In this day and age, our overly coddled young people have come to expect that they should be automatically shielded from anything that could remotely be considered harmful or offensive, and as a result we now have an entire generation that is completely lacking in toughness. That may be fine as long as you can depend on Mom and Dad, but how in the world are these young men and women going to handle the difficult challenges that come with living in the real world?
Author Claire Fox has a great deal of experience dealing with these overly sensitive young people, and she has dubbed them “Generation Snowflake”…
Bill Bonner, whose Diaries we republish here, is well-known for being an equal opportunity offender – meaning that political affiliation, gender, age, or any other defining characteristics won’t save worthy targets from getting offended. As far as we are concerned, we generally try not to be unnecessarily rude to people, but occasionally giving offense is not exactly beneath us either.
The motto of the equal opportunity offender….
Some people really deserve it after all…which is why we often refer to modern-day central bankers as lunatics, politicians as psychopaths, governments as gangs of highway robbers waving a flag, and so forth. On one occasion we even provided a translation of Mr. Böhmermann’s “abusive criticism” of Mr. Erdogan, which fell afoul of a 19th century lèse majesté law on Germany’s statute books.
That poem really was rude and insulting, no doubt about it. However, locking up journalists and opposition politicians under the pretext that they “threaten national security”, or bombing and suppressing ethnic minorities (for narrow and selfish political goals to boot) seems a lot worse to us.
The person responsible actually deserves to be insulted day and night, and given how thin-skinned Mr. Erdogan is, insulting him is great fun to boot. Admittedly, only as long as one is not within grabbing distance of his enforcers.
A population of illiterate, non-thinking morons can’t possibly obtain good paying jobs. This country spends $12,000 per public school student per year on education and this is the outcome? The factual data presented below paints a picture of an empire in rapid decline. We are too far gone. No amount of money or presidential election is going to change this course. We chose this path in the 1960s and now we will reap the consequences.
Education
In a study of literacy among 20 ‘high income’ countries; US ranked 12th
Illiteracy has become such a serious problem in our country that 44 million adults are now unable to read a simple story to their children.
50% of adults cannot read a book written at an eighth grade level
45 million are functionally illiterate and read below a 5th grade level
44% of the American adults do not read a book in a year
6 out of 10 households do not buy a single book in a year
Economy
According to the Pew Research Center, the median income of middle-class households declined by 4 percent from 2000 to 2014.
The Pew Research Center has also found that median wealth for middle-class households dropped by an astounding 28 percent between 2001 and 2013.
There are still 900,000 fewer middle-class jobs in America than there were when the last recession began, but the population has grown significantly larger since that time.
According to the Social Security Administration, 51 percent of all American workers make less than $30,000 a year.
An astounding 48.8 percent of all 25-year-old Americans still live at home with their parents.
According to the U.S. Census Bureau, 49 percent of all Americans now live in a home that receives money from the government each month, and nearly 47 million Americans are living in poverty right now.
In 2007, about one out of every eight children in America was on food stamps. Today, that number is one out of every five.
The median net worth of families in the United States was $137, 955 in 2007. Today, it is just $82,756.
Princeton Professor Harry Frankfurt provides a succinct primer on why truth needs to prevail over bullshit - something that could be helpful for many.
"People should care about the truth, because the truth is the truth about how things are and it's important us to recognize how things are, not to pretend that it's something else. If you have the truth you know what reality is like, if you don't you're ignorant of reality"
"We are living in an age in which there's another alternative to the truth, and that's bullshit"
"The reason why there's so much bullshit I think is that people just talk. If they don't talk they don't get paid. The advertiser wants to gain sales, the politician wants to get gain votes. Now, that's ok, but they have to talk about things that they don't really know much about. So since they don't have anything really valid to say, they just say whatever they think will interest the audience, make it appear that they know what they're talking about - and what comes out is bullshit."
"The danger is that there will be a loss of concern for the truth, and that I believe is an insidious assault on the fundamental principles of society."
If one had to choose a single symbol to represent the apex of human thought and achievement, a strong candidate would be the equal sign: =. That sign says that the symbols and mathematical operations to the left of it are equal to the symbols and mathematical operations to the right. Furthermore, to retain equality, anything done to the left side of the equation must be done to the right side. The equation is the heart of elementary arithmetic, the most complex principals of mathematics and science and their real world applications, and everything in between. Only logical challenge can disprove an asserted equality, and no amount of wishing will turn an inequality into an equality. The equal sign represents humanity’s capacity for ruthlessly pristine logic.
Many people shun mathematics, science, and logic, seeking refuge in their antitheses. A good part of human intellectual history has been attempts to either ignore equalities or turn inequalities into equalities. Forgiving, sloppy, delusional illogic is usually collective. Every age has its particular refuges. Our age has rejected the mathematics of debt. What can logically not occur, a perpetual inequality—consumption greater than production— has become the foundation of the global economy. As the tagline for Zero Hedge notes: “On a long enough timeline the survival rate for everyone drops to zero.” In the same vein, on a long enough timeline, consumption equals production. Understand that equality, and the future comes into stark relief.
Short, intense directed apprenticeships that teach students how to learn on their own to mastery are the future of higher education.
So it turns out sitting in a chair for four years doesn't deliver mastery in anything but the acquisition of staggering student-loan debt. Practical (i.e. useful) mastery requires not just hours of practice but directed deep learning via doing of the sort you only get in an apprenticeship.
The failure of our model of largely passive learning and rote practice is explained by Daniel Coyle in his book The Talent Code (sent to me by Ron G.), which upends the notion that talent is a genetic gift. It isn't--in his words, it's grown by deep practice, the ignition of motivation and master coaching.
Let's start by admitting our system of higher education is unsustainable and broken: a complete failure by any reasonable, objective standard. Tuition has soared $1,100% while the output of the system (the economic/educational value of a college degree) has declined precipitously.
Video From UCLA Shows How Vulnerable Students Are In A Gun Free Zone Lockdown
A campus shooting on Wednesday at the University of California left two men dead in a murder-suicided that sent thousands of students looking for safety and locking themselves down in classrooms.
UCLA is a gun free zone that prohibits students from carrying a gun within 1,000 feet of school grounds under Penal Code 626.9 PC, also known as California’s Gun-Free School Zone Act.
UCLA’s campus policyalso, “Prohibits the transportation and possession of firearms and other dangerous weapons on the grounds of UCLA campus, off-campus buildings owned or operated by the University, areas adjacent to University Property or to activities of or programs conducted by the University, whether on or off University Property.”
What this means is that students have little way of defending themselves from a gunman who is seeking to do harm.
In this footage obtained by RT, you can see how students have nothing else to do for their safety but to lock themselves into a classroom and wait for the situation to be defused.
If a determined gunman wanted to barge into the classroom where the students in the video above were hiding, it’s very possible that he could have done so if he had enough time.
As you can see, all the students can do is to sit still and wait, in hopes they do not become targets.
UCLA’s gun policy and the state of California’s penal code establishing gun free zones did absolutely nothing to prevent the man who committed the horrific act on Wednesday from bringing his gun on campus.
Last October the state of California passed a bill that bans concealed handguns on campus.
What this video shows is that the states regulations are putting students in a terribly vulnerable position that could allow a determined gunman to do more damage then he otherwise would be able to do if students and faculty had sufficient means of self-defense.
In the same vein of socially engineered stupidity as “safe spaces” and “microaggressions,” seniors graduating at Plano High School in Texas have been told they are not allowed to wear their hard-earned National Honor Society stole during graduation… basically because some of the other kids who didn’t earn the honors might get their feelings hurt because they don’t have a stole.
According to school practices, students are not allowed to wear NHS regalia.
Garrett Frederick has been a National Honor Society member since his sophomore year, dedicating himself to maintaining a high GPA and performing community service hours.
“I’m not just an honor student — I’m an NHS student. I worked hard. I put in the hours,” Frederick said, explaining that he committed to 20 hours of community service every semester.
Note that students don’t just have to maintain a 3.6 GPA to be inducted into National Honor Society, they also have to complete 20 hours of community service each semester.
In a world where the younger generations are being trained that nothing over 140 characters is worth being said or read, now for just under three bucks, young adults who don’t have time to read The (actual) Bible can now download the simplified emojicon version from iTunes.
Although it’s called “Bible Emoji: Scripture for Millenials” (that’s right, the title itself on the cover of the book is misspelled), it has already been referred to as “The Kardashian Bible”.
Description:
First ever Bible translation w/ emojis.
A great and fun way to share the gospel. Explore all 66 books chronicling the the stories of Abraham, Noah and Jesus like never before!
