Why Go To College? Why Go To Night School?

If you are a regular reader of this blog, you are aware that I am highly skeptical of the American higher education system. At best, it is a terribly inefficient cash grab by institutions who claim to be serving the public. At worse, it is a rigorous form of social apartheid which feeds on the fears of the elites and their desires to guarantee success for their progeny.

Either way, we can blow up this system at any point and I would not shed tear one for any tenured professor.

The Wall Street Journal, which I rode over the coals a couple of weeks ago, contains a piece by Charles Murray which I couldn't agree with more.

Imagine that America had no system of post-secondary education, and you were a member of a task force assigned to create one from scratch. One of your colleagues submits this proposal:

First, we will set up a single goal to represent educational success, which will take four years to achieve no matter what is being taught. We will attach an economic reward to it that seldom has anything to do with what has been learned. We will urge large numbers of people who do not possess adequate ability to try to achieve the goal, wait until they have spent a lot of time and money, and then deny it to them. We will stigmatize everyone who doesn't meet the goal. We will call the goal a "BA."

You would conclude that your colleague was cruel, not to say insane. But that's the system we have in place.

Fantastic! Murray calls for a series of certification tests as a means for institutions to identify appropriate candidates, modeled on the CPA. I concur. I distinctly recall my state certification test for teaching. The test was such an absolute joke- a fact that indicted not only the state Board of Ed but the schools who provide Illinois with teachers.

To paraphrase Will Hunting, Americans spend billions of dollars collecting initials after their names which could be had for hundreds of dollars in late fines at the public library in a more perfect world.

Making Money In America for Free!

You too don't have to pay any income taxes. All you have to do is incorporate yourself. The Pocono Record has AP reporting that two-thirds of US companies paid no federal income tax between 1998 and 2005.

I repeat, TWO-THIRDS of US companies paid ZERO federal income taxes.

And people are scared of higher taxes from Obama? How 'bout we vote out the people who gave corporations the free pass.

Americans. We pay Coca-Cola to sell sugary drinks in China. Fantastic!

The Truth Behind the Energy Ads

I'm really digging the Olympics this year. Maybe it's because I just fell for the hype, or that I am thoroughly engaged by a gigantic country's coming-out party (this is the most historically significant Olympics since those of 1936 in Berlin (and let's hope it's not that kind of history in fifty years)). I like to think it's because I have a DVR and can FF'd through the non-stop Coca Cola and Nike ads. Two ads I do run across frequently are those by John McCain and Barack Obama. The two ads are freakishly similar, down to the same stock footage, and state that either candidate has the best energy plan and their opponent's sucks.

Thomas Friedman wrote in Tuesday's New York Times that neither McCain or Obama was around to vote in an extension of solar and wind energy tax credits, thereby basically putting a moratorium on alternative energy for '09.

The fact that Congress has failed eight times to renew them is largely because of a hard core of Republican senators who either don’t want to give Democrats such a victory in an election year or simply don’t believe in renewable energy.

What impact does this have? In the solar industry today there is a rush to finish any project that would be up and running by Dec. 31 — when the credits expire — and most everything beyond that is now on hold. Consider the Solana concentrated solar power plant, 70 miles southwest of Phoenix in McCain’s home state. It is the biggest proposed concentrating solar energy project ever. The farsighted local utility is ready to buy its power.

EIGHT TIMES? Wow. Hey, the Democrats are actually trying at least.

People, the Republicans are devastating our energy plans. Do not believe McCain's distortions.

And Barack, you got to show up for the big votes, brother. No free passes here.

Where Are The Missing Fifty Million Indian Women?

Nobel laureate economist Amartya Sen compared the natural ratio between men and women globally to the ratio in India and found that India has fifty million less women than it should have. Where are these women? They are dead. India has a massive, hidden, socially-sanctioned genocide on their hands.

The numbers are jaw-dropping:

• Some one million female fetuses are aborted each year.
• Midwives in some regions regularly kill the infant girls they deliver for as little as $1.50.
• Dowry-related murders of women stand at about 25,000 cases a year.
• A UNICEF report found that the mortality rate for girls under five is more than 40 percent higher than for boys the same age.
• WHO and UNIFEM estimate that one pregnant woman dies every five minutes in India.

Sure, in a country of over a billion people, "What is fifty million?" you might be thinking. Those are people's daughters, sisters, friends. The Mount Holyoake Alumnae Quarterly has an interview with a photographer, Rita Banerji, covering the killing of women in India.

Fifty million is SEVENTEEN times the population of Chicago.

With this post and now this, Shambollocks is proud to be fighting for women's rights in India.

Hillary: The Post-Mortem

The Antlantic's Joshua Green has an exhaustive analysis of how Hillary Clinton and her staff blew up her chances to become the Democratic nominee for President. Most of the fault lies with Hillary herself, who allowed her own media paranoia to cripple the huge edge she had in name recognition. Basically, Clinton is a brand-a successful, well-known brand. Hillary made the brand mysterious, which took some effort considering how famous her and her husband are. Her distrust of the media allowed Obama and Edward to capitalize on the void by using the media to spread their own core messages. Finally, her decision to bail early in Iowa will be studied in political science classes forever as an example of how to make an opponent bigger than you. Obama's win in an overwhelmingly white, heartland state launched him as a legitimate contender, an image she didn't combat until much too late in the campaign.

As I've written before, Hillary deserved to lose because she ran a poor campaign.

I highly recommend this article if you are a fan of inter-office politics and arrogance. The Clinton campaign's emails are hilarious to read.

Great John McCain Profile from Arizona

The Phoenix New Times News (no, I've never heard of them either) has a wonderful profile on John McCain entitled 'Postmodern John McCain: the presidential candidate some Arizonans know- and loath' It seems Sen. McCain is not as popular in his home state as his campaign would leave us to believe. The story gives us a glimpse of the '80s John McCain, the Senator who got himself inextricably involved in the savings and loans scandal (think mortgage crisis for the '80s) by becoming close, personal friends with Charlie Keating. I don't want to rehash the whole episode, which this articles does well, but there is an anecdote that should be told.

In the late '80s, Arizona was suffering through an Illinois-like rash of political corruption. The Republican governor at the time, Evan Mecham, was impeached and the long-serving Democratic secretary of state, Rose Mofford, stepped up to serve out the rest of his term. A week into her tenure, Rose made a trip to Washington where she would make a perfuntory appearance before the Senate Energy and Water Development Subcommittee on Appropriations on the topic of the Central Arizona Project (the '60s era water project which allows for humans to live in Arizona). Rose had not been briefed extensively on the project.

At the hearing, Republican Senator James McClure fired a series of complex questions at Rose which left her staff scrambling to find the answers. That same day, Pat Murphy, publisher of the Arizona Republic, arrived at the Senate with his wife to take McCain out to lunch. Murphy tells the rest of the story to the News writer via email:

"During lunch, McCain said, almost with mischievous glee, that he had slipped some highly technical questions to [James McClure] to ask Mofford — questions she wouldn't be prepared to answer or expected to answer.

"Flabbergasted, I asked McCain why would he want to sabotage Mofford's testimony, when in fact the CAP was the nonpartisan pet of Republicans and Democrats — such as far-left Udall and far-right Goldwater — since its inception.

"His reply, as near as I remember, was, 'I'll embarrass a Democrat any time I get the chance.'

Whatever my disappointment with Obama's centrist poses the last couple of months, my belief that he will steer us away from the vehemently personal Washington partisanship of the last generation has not wavered. I am sick of watching the unending conflict over the cultural gulf which exists between conservative and liberal boomers. Vietnam and the civil rights marches ended thirty-five years ago, people. Get over it! Stop licking wounds incurred when Nixon resigned and educate yourself on the fairly progressive country you happen to represent.

McCain represents our country's past. Let's make that distant past history. Finally.

R.I.P. Bernie Mac

One of the best things about spending so much of my adolescence hauling body shop supplies around the South Side was the hilarious stories I heard from the black body shops. These guys could tell stories. They took care not to leave out any detail, and once you were there for the beginning you had to stick around for the end-no matter if you were in the worst part of the ghetto or not. Those guys could shoot the bull like nobody I've known since. And they could swear. They truly wove tapestries of profanity so wondrous they left me speechless.

Bernie Mac was one of those guys who hit the big time. I loved him because the rhythm of his speech was home to me. Bernie was a lyrical comedian. It wasn't the content (hell, most of it was shtick even whites have heard done ad nausea), it was how he said it. The man could rap. Here's a great clip from his career-making performance in the Kings of Comedy film. NOT OKAY FOR WORK.



Bernie, you were one hard-core, funny motherfucker.