Stable Genius Liberal

William Deresiewicz, Ivy League: The persistent, misguided belief that universities can transform students into better, less-entitled people.

n truth, Deresiewicz doesn’t actually have a problem with out-of-touch, entitled students. He merely prefers that they learn to think in the right ways. Spending vast sums of money to purchase an education that will secure you a position at a hedge fund is bad. Spending vast sums of money on, as Deresiewicz puts it, “building a self,” is noble. The fact that pursuing a self-building education might be worthwhile doesn’t change the fact that such an education is as much of a luxury good as a yacht. In fairness, though, Deresiewicz would prefer it if more elite students opted to purchase intellect and insight at a discount. Avoiding the Ivies and going to a public school, he says, is how to prevent yourself from being an out-of-touch, entitled little shit.

I laughed too hard at this.

George Will Shocks Fox News Panel: Tell Child Refugees ‘Welcome To America’

“We ought to say to these children, ‘Welcome to America, you’re going to go to school, and get a job, and become American,’” Will suggested. “We have 3,141 counties in this country. That would be 20 per county.”

…

Will explained. “We’ve handled what [American poet] Emma Lazarus called the ‘wretched refuse of your teeming shore’ a long time ago, and a lot more people than this.”

I don’t alway agree with him, but he is right here. The idea that there exists some subset of people who can not become American is contrary to all the historical evidence. Those kids will make it.

Indonesia: Metal fans cheer Joko Widodo win

It looks like Gilbert Gottfried was elected president of Indonesia. The guy is a metal head and he looks like Gilbert.

Always Inflation Somewhere

And what about Shadowstats, which claims that inflation is much higher than the government lets on? A subscription costs $175 — the same as 8 years ago.

Prices go up? Inflation. Prices go down? Supply and demand.

US states with higher minimum wages gain more jobs

This isn’t a full on knock down argument. We will see once the numbers for Seattle’s $15/hr minimum wage are published. I suspect that Seattle made a mistake and that at the $15/hr rate you are going to see some adverse results. I could be wrong here.

Obamacare implementation went great and people love it

None of this proves that the Affordable Care Act is a good law or that conservatives should love it. But it does prove that the Affordable Care Act is working just fine. When an initiative comes in ahead of schedule and below-cost, that’s called working. And the people on the new Obamacare plans are using them and they like them.

We are two decades away from people holding up signs demanding the government keep out of their Obamacare.

Sweden school choice: The country’s disastrous experiment with Milton Friedman and vouchers.

Advocates for choice-based solutions should take a look at what’s happened to schools in Sweden, where parents and educators would be thrilled to trade their country’s steep drop in PISA scores over the past 10 years for America’s middling but consistent results. What’s caused the recent crisis in Swedish education? Researchers and policy analysts are increasingly pointing the finger at many of the choice-oriented reforms that are being championed as the way forward for American schools. While this doesn’t necessarily mean that adding more accountability and discipline to American schools would be a bad thing, it does hint at the many headaches that can come from trying to do so by aggressively introducing marketlike competition to education.

The argument from the right will be that it wasn’t free market enough. That if there had been less government it would have worked.

Clearly, this reform didn’t work in Sweden. Maybe there was some basic flaw in the implementation. Maybe its just a flawed idea.

Unused LotR Audio Commentary By Howard Zinn And Noam Chomsky

Chomsky: We should examine carefully what’s being established here in the prologue. For one, the point is clearly made that the “master ring,” the so-called “one ring to rule them all,” is actually a rather elaborate justification for preemptive war on Mordor.

I followed this from kottke. This is amazing. They capture Chomsky’s brilliance peppered with bullshit perfectly.

Build We Won’t

We can’t simply write a check to the highway fund, we’re told, because that would increase the deficit. And deficits are evil, at least when there’s a Democrat in the White House, even if the government can borrow at incredibly low interest rates. And we can’t raise gas taxes because that would be a tax increase, and tax increases are even more evil than deficits. So our roads must be allowed to fall into disrepair.

How Tea Party tax cuts are turning Kansas into a smoking ruin

The state’s rainy-day fund is dwindling to zero. Month after month, revenue comes in even lower than fiscal officials’ most dire expectations. In the rest of the country, school budgets are finally beginning to recover from the toll of the last recession; in Kansas, they’re still falling. Healthcare, assistance for the poor, courts, and other state services are being eviscerated.

The cynic in me thinks that’s the result they want. To cut taxes on the wealthy and services for the poor and blame the poor economy on immigrants and Obama.