If teachers are welfare queens, then social theorists at Ivy League colleges must be world-class parasites

I saw this title on an article by Randall Collins and my hackles rose, my eyes turned red, I started to sprout hair everywhere as I growled and slavered. I will have blood.

Millennials, rise up! College is a scam — you have nothing to lose but student debt

Students chase degree after degree, adding crushing debt, as jobs vanish. It is time to radically rethink college

Now wait, I said to myself as I tried to suppress the change, titles are written by editors, and sometimes reflect the content poorly — they are trying to get a rise out of you, so you’ll read what follows. Maybe it’s not so bad. Give the guy a chance. So I read on.

Credential inflation is the rise in educational requirements for jobs as a rising proportion of the population attains more advanced degrees. The value of a given educational certificate or diploma declines as more people have one, thereby motivating them to stay in school longer. In the United States, high-school (i.e., twelve-year secondary school) diplomas were comparatively rare before World War II; now high-school degrees are so commonplace that their job value is worthless.

Job…value? JOB VALUE? We have a more educated citizenry (not educated enough, I would say, looking sideways at the Tea Party), and this bozo is complaining that their value is less because so many have reached a minimal educational standard? The US has a literacy rate of approximately 99% — what a disgrace. What is the point of teaching people to read if it doesn’t give them an edge over a vast illiterate mob? Think what a great advantage it would give you if you were one of the only 1% who could add and subtract — you’d have great job security, and your market value would be phenomenal! Afghanistan, with it’s overall literacy rate of 28%, should be regarded as an ideal.

In light of this wonderfully blinkered perspective on education, I am radically rethinking college myself. Maybe we need institutions of ignorance to slap down millions of minds just to keep the economic value of my degrees high…because, after all, the only reason I do what I do is for my personal gain, with never a thought about making society better or helping other individuals.

Oh, wait. I forgot. We do have such institutions of ignorance: they’re called churches. I am beginning to see their place in the ecosystem of culture.

This attitude is taken for granted throughout the article, which sees all of education solely in a vocational light.

Educational degrees are a currency of social respectability, traded for access to jobs; like any currency, it inflates prices (or reduces purchasing power) when autonomously driven increases in monetary supply chase a limited stock of goods, in this case chasing an ever more contested pool of upper-middle-class jobs.

I know the universities promote this view already, advertising their role as one of granting access to the big bucks of a job after graduation. I hate it. Most faculty don’t think that way either — if we did, we sure as hell wouldn’t have used our ever-so-precious degrees to get jobs at relatively low paying places like colleges.

We are not handing out tickets to jobs. If you want that, go to a vocational college and learn a trade; this is an entirely respectable option and is often a very wise move. Go to college if you want to learn something about how the world works more deeply, or if you want to experience the unconventional and different and see a wider picture. Go to college because there’s something you love that you can’t pursue elsewhere precisely because it has no market value…but it means something to you as a human being. Poetry is not a path to riches, but in college you can find people who love it; there’s practically no economic value to thinking hard about ethics, but at a college you’ll not only find people who live for ethical issues, but will teach you what they know and ask you hard questions to make you think more about it too. Why learn about history, or dead languages, or exotically impractical bits of abstract mathematics, or putter about making art? Because it will make you wealthy? Hell, no. Because you’ve only got one life to live and you ought to use it to make yourself wiser and happier, and if learning about those weird and strangely human subjects is what you want to do, do it.

There are things we need to fix in our educational system, I would agree. But the very last people you should consult on how to fix it are those who so poorly understand the meaning of the word “education” that they confuse it with a certification in a task. Randall Collins is clearly such a benighted ignoramus that I could feel my urge to howl at the moon declining…until…

Until…

Although educational credential inflation expands on false premises— the ideology that more education will produce more equality of opportunity, more high-tech economic performance, and more good jobs—it does provide some degree of solution to technological displacement of the middle class. Educational credential inflation helps absorb surplus labor by keeping more people out of the labor force; and if students receive a financial subsidy, either directly or in the form of low-cost (and ultimately unrepaid) loans, it acts as hidden transfer payments. In places where the welfare state is ideologically unpopular, the mythology of education supports a hidden welfare state. Add the millions of teachers in elementary, secondary, and higher education, and their administrative staffs, and the hidden Keynesianism of educational inflation may be said to virtually keep the capitalist economy afloat.

Aaaargh. The “mythology of education”? K-12 teachers are in sinecures, sucking up money to keep the economy afloat? Schools are a hidden welfare system for teachers who really aren’t otherwise contributing to the economy or society as a whole?

Fuck that. I’m wolfing out. GRRRRRRR.

Hey, Brits: You know what you can do with your monarchy, right?

The same thing the Yanks ought to do with their vapid celebrities: time to build the ‘B’ Ark. I have an aversion to those horrible little puff pieces about the Royals that come out of the British press, but I get a lot of my news out of the UK, and every once in a while one of those stories comes wafting by on the data stream, like a giant flocculent, spongy turd packaged in candy floss — and I get an unpleasant splat in my face. So I found myself reading with horror some noise about Prince Charles and homeopathy. Because I love you all so much, I figured I’d share.

After a plodding long prologue somberly discussing the history of Charles’s doddering brain encountering 16th century alchemical balderdash and haranguing the British Medical Association with it, and with his founding of various money sinks for bunkum, we get to his toxic effects on the citizenry.

Nevertheless, Charles’s support has, in no small part, led to a surge in the number of patients seeking such treatments. Nearly six million Britons now see complementary practitioners each year, and one in four would like access to be universally available on the NHS. (Currently, treatments are accessible only in some areas, including Bristol and Lothian.) Over-the-counter remedies, such as arnica cream, have seen a 24 per cent growth in sales in the past decade.

Rachel Roberts, chief executive of the Homeopathy Research Institute, admits that she was once sceptical about holistic medicine but was won over by Charles’s endorsement of the practice. The royal physician is Dr Peter Fisher, clinical director at the Royal London Hospital for Integrated Medicine and an accredited homeopath.

“The Royal family have huge resources and access to everything medicine has to offer, yet they choose homeopathy,” explains Roberts. “I thought, ‘Why would they use it if it doesn’t work?’”

She sees Charles as a revolutionary. “He’s outspoken about his beliefs and doesn’t appear to care that he’s going against the tide of opinion,” she says. “He gives homeopathy a voice. Now we’re seeing a U-turn in how it is being received, and the rest of the world is catching up to where Prince Charles has been for decades.”

Oooh! A bunch of filthy rich people are promoting something insanely stupid, but surely they couldn’t have got to where they are now without being clever and wise and all that, surely? Do I really need to inform the British public that your prince achieved his status in the world entirely by virtue of being born to the right parents, and he didn’t have to earn a bit of it?

Just a suggestion: go read The Monarchy: A Critique of Britain’s Favourite Fetish by Christopher Hitchens. It’s short, it’s cheap, it gets right to the point.

Simple answers for stupid people

Richard Cohen, one of the dumber conservatives to have a cushy job as a pundit, comments on the Republican Party.

Today’s GOP is not racist, as Harry Belafonte alleged about the tea party, but it is deeply troubled — about the expansion of government, about immigration, about secularism, about the mainstreaming of what used to be the avant-garde. People with conventional views must repress a gag reflex when considering the mayor-elect of New York — a white man married to a black woman and with two biracial children. (Should I mention that Bill de Blasio’s wife, Chirlane McCray, used to be a lesbian?) This family represents the cultural changes that have enveloped parts — but not all — of America. To cultural conservatives, this doesn’t look like their country at all.

Pro-tip: if you find yourself gagging at the thought of interracial marriage, you are racist. You are so racist you are choking on your own racism.

Bonus! If you find yourself uncomfortable with the thought that someone’s partner might have once had a same-sex relationship, you’re also homophobic!

That’s the state of America’s Republicans: racist and homophobic and so stupid that they don’t even realize it.

You want a useful roundup of Cohen’s past idiocies? You got it. It leaves out the time he told a young girl she didn’t need algebra, though.

Aww, Cohen’s feelings are hurt because everyone is calling him a racist. His defense? It’s because he’s a liberal.

Cohen has been criticized for his comments on race in the past. When asked why he thought it was that he keeps getting caught up in racially charged arguments, he said that its because people view him as a liberal and find some of his positions unconventional. "Every once in a while I take an unconventional stance as a liberal — as someone who has always been called a liberal," he said. "If someone on the right wrote this, no one would care. No one would make a big deal about it but because I veer every once in awhile from orthodoxy, or maybe more than once in awhile, I get plastered this way."

Fuck him. Go read Ta-Nehisi Coates instead.

Bruce Schneier is blessed in his enemies

A critic calls out Schneier on CNN iReports. He thinks Scheier is a phony with no serious credentials, and doesn’t like all this criticism of the NSA. He also detests irony, I think.

Weeks of research regarding Mr. Schneier’s claims have highlighted one of the most frustrating problems with the internet age. Because virtually anyone lacking serious journalistic credentials can, and often does, write or post freely on any subject, the resulting sheer volume of information available may lead people to believe that the reporting is even-handed and well-researched. Unfortunately, in many circumstances nothing can be farther from the truth.

The title of this scathing indictment of allowing any ol’ wanker to post stuff on the web? Public shoud qestion Schneier, Snowden and NSA. Spelling exactly as presented on the web page.

Who needs reason & evidence when you’ve got hurt feelings?

Francis Spufford has written a book called Unapologetic: Why, Despite Everything, Christianity Still Makes Surprising Emotional Sense. I don’t think I’ll be reading it, if this excerpt is at all representative, because what it represents is all that I despise about Christianity and Christians. Number one: their persecution complex. That aura of sanctity they all get by piously reciting all the horrible things done to them because of their deep, profound, all-important faith. So Spufford babbles, at excruciating length, about all the misconceptions atheists have about Christians.

It means that we’re dogmatic. That we’re self-righteous. That we fetishize pain and suffering. That we advocate wishy-washy niceness. That we promise the oppressed pie in the sky when they die. That we’re bleeding hearts who don’t understand the wealth-creating powers of the market. That we’re too stupid to understand the irrationality of our creeds. That we build absurdly complex intellectual structures, full of meaningless distinctions, on the marshmallow foundations of a fantasy. That we uphold the nuclear family, with all its micro-tyrannies and imprisoning stereotypes. That we’re the hairshirted enemies of the ordinary family pleasures of parenthood, shopping, sex and car ownership. That we’re savagely judgmental. That we’d free murderers to kill again. That we think everyone who disagrees with us is going to roast for all eternity. That we’re as bad as Muslims. That we’re worse than Muslims, because Muslims are primitives who can’t be expected to know any better. That we’re better than Muslims, but only because we’ve lost the courage of our convictions. That we’re infantile and can’t do without an illusory daddy in the sky. That we destroy the spontaneity and hopefulness of children by implanting a sick mythology in your minds. That we oppose freedom, human rights, gay rights, individual moral autonomy, a woman’s right to choose, stem cell research, the use of condoms in fighting AIDS, the teaching of evolutionary biology. Modernity. Progress. That we think everyone should be cowering before authority. That we sanctify the idea of hierarchy. That we get all snooty and yuck-no-thanks about transsexuals, but think it’s perfectly normal for middle-aged men to wear purple dresses. That we cover up child abuse, because we care more about power than justice. That we’re the villains in history, on the wrong side of every struggle for human liberty. That if we sometimes seem to have been on the right side of one of said struggles, we weren’t really; or the struggle wasn’t about what it appeared to be about; or we didn’t really do the right thing for the reasons we said we did. That we’ve provided pious cover stories for racism, imperialism, wars of conquest, slavery, exploitation. That we’ve manufactured imaginary causes for real people to kill each other. That we’re stuck in the past. That we destroy tribal cultures. That we think the world’s going to end. That we want to help the world to end. That we teach people to hate their own natural selves. That we want people to be afraid. That we want people to be ashamed. That we have an imaginary friend; that we believe in a sky pixie; that we prostrate ourselves before a god who has the reality status of Santa Claus. That we prefer scripture to novels, preaching to storytelling, certainty to doubt, faith to reason, law to mercy, primary colors to shades, censorship to debate, silence to eloquence, death to life.

Jesus fucking Christ, man, get down off that giant cross you’ve erected! You’re going to hurt yourself!

And that’s only a small piece of the long tirade. He has more than a few misconceptions about atheists, himself. He goes off about how Christians are supposed to be embarrassed because they’re not Harry Potter or Star Wars, how atheism is all about hedonism rather than the richly human complexity of Deep Theology, and how he’s so bitter about suggestions that we enjoy our lives, and “Imagine”, and pop culture, and how much he thinks Mozart is wonderful, and there’s not one word that explains why religion adds anything to our lives.

Fuck it, never mind, Spufford, go ahead and climb back up on that rickety cross with your mouthful of nails — it’ll shut you up and keep you happy for a while.

Especially when this is the one strong assertion you make in the midst of all your whiny caterwauling about how awfully terrible it is that some of us look at your tearful tantrum with contempt.

I think that the reason reality is that way, is in some ultimate sense merciful as well as being a set of physical processes all running along on their own without hope of appeal, all the way up from quantum mechanics to the relative velocity of galaxies by way of “blundering, low and horridly cruel” biology (Darwin), is that the universe is sustained by a continual and infinitely patient act of love. I think that love keeps it in being. I think that Dante’s cosmology was crap, but that he was right to say that it’s “love that moves the sun and all the other stars.”

And you’re unapologetic about dishing up that load of bullshit? Shameless, more like.

In case you were wondering, gravity and momentum keep the stars and planets moving, and not one bit of love or absence thereof will nudge stone or plasma a nanometer.

Kraken man is back

He’s persistent, I’ll say that for him. I first encountered Mark McMenamin as an enthusiastic promoter of Stuart Pivar’s inflatable donut model of development. He then sank from sight, along with the pretentious septic tank salesmen, until two years ago, when he presented piles of ichthyosaur vertebrae as evidence that a giant cephalopod, a kraken, had been creating Mesozoic art by arranging the disks into a self portrait.

You may laugh now.

He presented at the Denver GSA meeting this year. Here’s his abstract.

THE KRAKEN’S BACK: NEW EVIDENCE REGARDING POSSIBLE CEPHALOPOD ARRANGEMENT OF ICHTHYOSAUR SKELETONS

MCMENAMIN, Mark A.S. and SCHULTE MCMENAMIN, Dianna L., Geology and Geography, Mount Holyoke College, South Hadley, MA 01075

In 2011, we hypothesized that extremely large Triassic cephalopods may be responsible for certain anomalous aspects of an unusual assemblage of giant ichthyosaur skeletons in the Luning Formation of Nevada. The hypothesis has been criticized by researchers who do not accept the ichnological evidence suggesting that the skeletons were deliberately arranged rather than being deposited by currents.

Hydrodynamic considerations regarding the probability of displacement (PD) of ichthyosaur vertebral centra arrays (n=12) show that three different biserial arrangements have PDs of 17%, 89% and 100% respectively by currents strong enough to displace a single centra. The critical Specimen U array at Berlin‑Ichthyosaur State Park has PD=~100, indicating that it is highly unlikely that the biserial pattern was imparted by submarine currents. The unwinnowed wackestone matrix confirms that competent water velocities did not frequently occur in this deep-water depositional environment. The Luning Formation also hosts Protopaleodictyon ichnosp. and supergiant amphipods.

We recently obtained photographs of a retired exhibit formerly on display at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, Museum of Natural History. The display reconstructed a well‑preserved Shonisaurus skeleton as it was found in the field. The exhibit is well documented by photographs from a variety of vantage points. The skeleton appears to have been partly disassembled during the Triassic, and a biserial array of centra very similar to the Specimen U array occurs adjacent to the nearly complete skeleton. The UNLV array has a PD=~100, again indicating that the biserial pattern was not the result of current assembly. Finally, at least three of these centra show what may be triangular bite marks removed from their margins.

His latest evidence consists of a second array of vertebrae in a line (that’s right, his earlier remarkable claim was based on a single example of bones in a line), and he is also claiming that a non-random arrangement of the bones can only be explained by an intelligent cephalopod, with no other natural processes possible.

Furthermore, as the Huffington Post credulously (their only mode) reports, he has additional evidence in the form of a giant fossilized beak. Here it is:

krakenbeak

It’s a fragmented, unidentified chunk of rock, a few inches long, which he extrapolates by comparison to a Humboldt squid beak he bought on eBay to be the tip of a giant beak belonging to a squid that was between 50 and 100 meters long.

That’s it. When ichthyosaurs decay, their vertebrae tend to fall in a line, and here’s a broken rock that kinda vaguely looks like a bit of a beak, and from this he builds this elaborate fantasy of a giant kraken roaming Triassic seas crushing ichthyosaurs to death and then sculpting their bones into squid pictures.

He should go back to praising balloon animals.

Whoops. I neglected to mention another indictment of his rationality: McMenamin is a “devout Christian” who also believes in Intelligent Design creationism.

My name is Mark McMenamin. I have completed a PhD on the fossils of the Cambrian Explosion, have published several books on the subject, and am a devout Christian. At the present time I am actively researching the latest fossil discoveries from Cambrian boundary strata.

The libertarian mindset on proud display

I hope you aren’t working on dinner right now, because watching John Stossel and Steve Doocy flaunt their inability to empathize with anyone but their own selfish interests will cause you to lose it.

Stossel is outraged that he has to pay the same insurance premiums as a woman — they go to the doctor more! It’s not as if regular checkups might actually reduce health care costs, you know — he’s saving money by skipping on the maintenance and waiting for the catastrophic disaster.

As for smug little twit Doocy: “I’m in my 60s. Why should I pay for your maternity care?”

Hey, I’m in my 50s, why should I subsidize your greater health care needs, old man? My kids are in their 20s, they shouldn’t have to pay for any insurance, ’cause they’re healthy and young!

Maybe because someday I, and they, will be in our 60s, too. And maybe somebody Doocy loves will need maternity care (oh, wait, no, that can’t be can it? These are Fox News goons, they can’t possibly love a woman, ever.)

Stossel, by the way, is 66. Why the hell is he still employed, still insured, still supported by anyone? Isn’t it way past time for society to stop subsidizing the old geezer, shuffling him off to pasture so young people can move up?

Or is it possible that a responsible society values all of its members and gives them all lifelong equal citizenship?

White supremacists are getting a facelift?

At least, that’s what this guy Richard Spencer is claiming that he’s doing, trying to add a little intellectual respectability to a small gang of bigots. From this account of a conference the racists recently had, though, it sounds like the same old crap.

“If you cannot be for your own people, who can you be for?” one young man who gave his name as Helmut Schmidt said as a reason for attending the conference. “The reality is when white people are the minority in this country, it is going to be real bad.”

But really the conference was open to any number of overlapping topics that might attract disaffected white youngsters. Jack Donovan, an anti-feminist writer and “advocate for the resurgence of tribalism and manly virtue,” served up his shtick.

Donovan has argued that feminists are trying to create  “gender-neutral utopias” that will make men into “doughy bonobos and chunky Chaz Bonos playing out their endless manic-depressive melodramas in a big bean-flicking circle of sterility, sickness and desperation.”

“Do black people as a group care what happens to white people as a group? Does a Mexican dad with three babies care about whether some white kid from the burbs gets a summer landscaping job? Of course not,” Donovan said during his presentation, adding later, “You cannot play fair with people who don’t care if you get wiped off the map.”

Turn that last sentence around. Why should anyone play fair with white chauvinists who only care about brown people as nannies and gardners?

One message I got, though, was that the facelift seems to involve adding resentment against independent women to the stew of racial hatred that they usually tap into. It’s always been there, but in this story it’s pretty overt: white women must support the race by bearing lots of white babies.

You can find much more about the unsavory Richard Spencer at the SPLC. He’s currently head of the National Policy Institute, a racist think-tank founded by William Regnery, the far right wing publisher who also publishes a great many books by the Discovery Institute authors like Wells, Wiker, Richards, Gonzalez, Weikart, etc. It’s rather ironic that they love to publish books accusing evolution of being a Nazi plot fomenting Hitlerian ideas of eugenics, while at the same time promoting racial ideas that would have been right at home in Hitler’s government.