You wouldn't kid us......surely

Seen on the cover of a print edition of The Economist while shopping (paraphrased): "Doing something about America's economic tailspin."

Apparently it will take a magazine of that name, no doubt staffed by numerous Economists, interviewing or quoting from Economists, to tell us what should be obvious....but somehow we can't face it, and apparently on any level:

STOP SPENDING.

There. Now I'm an "Economist."

Economics has slid into repute as a putatitve "Social Science" (when no such thing exists), and treated as a secular religion. A half-century since the rise and fall of Keynesian theory (which should have killed off Economics as anything but stargazing, but didn't), some of its practitioners are regularly elevated to the eminence of shamans in our culture. And that's exactly what they are: the shamans and druids of a false religion. And they will retain their eminence because of that most powerful force in the universe: the human will to believe in something, even if demonstrably wrong, false-headed, and destructive.

This Just In- all people MAY not need to attend college

.....and that is all. (But you'd sure never know it to read the current bleatings about "underrepresented minorities" -whatever that means- in the graduation statistics.)

Rocky Observations

Having had occasion to spend the better part of a week in the environs of Boulder, CO and visits to a few locations in the Front Range of the Rockies, I have formed several opinions of this area:

1. We had a vastly enjoyable visit with our daughter; visiting her in her home was too long in coming.

2. Boulder, CO, despite the culture of tanned outdoorsy people busily walking, jogging, running, and biking (waiting, I gather, for skiing season), is basically an annoying university town filled with far too many entitled, self-important white people who are constantly looking to see who's looking- at them.

3. Colorado itself appears to provide just another huddle of human beings in the middle of the Wide Open Spaces. They either huddle in the cities, or huddle in the resorts and tourist traps, or huddle in the parking lots (amazingly crowded, for the middle of nowhere), and even the trails are somehow a group activity. At the risk of becoming discursive (a risk I am always prepared to take), the open spaces, or wastes -and despite the spectacular scenery, that is what a good bit of Colorado IS- have always been places of solitude, places for human beings to find themselves, or God, in reflections of nature. Nature in great big doses exists most emphatically in Colorado; of solitude I felt not the slightest trace.

4. As something of a postscript, if you are a-pining for the maximum amount of fragmented and thoughtless Green- or eco- babble....well, let's just say you won't be disappointed.

A Bit Further.....

A headline from The Onion? Oh, I wish:

Cystic Fibrosis Too White for Ottawa Fundraiser

Yep, it's real. Best comments I've read so far:

1. "That'll mean they won't do any fundraisers for sickle cell now."

2. "Unified thought leads to stupidity like this. That's a problem. People who have a vested financial interest in unified thought are a bigger problem. They take advantage of it.
The problem isn't liberalism or conservatism. The problem is that an idea (in this case, political correctness) is accepted by a group of people, without question or critical thought, and over time becomes distorted into something so radical that nobody outside that group could possibly be deluded enough to support it."

This is confined to some subpar Canadian university (Carleton), you say?

From the National Post of Toronto:

Queen's University in Kingston, Ont., has hired six students whose jobs as "dialogue facilitators" will involve intervening in conversations among students in dining halls and common rooms to encourage discussion of such social justice issues as race, ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation, ability and social class.

"Yes, there's nothing today's coeds look forward to more than the creepy 46-year-old Divinity student who is paid to chat them up about white privilege!"

Wordy

The online comic xkcd.com, which rocks -some of the time- has a great one here:

"A Bunch of Rocks"

I found the strip verbose, however. Richard Brautigan, a deservedly third-rate writer*, summed up this particular suspension of the laws of space-time better, in perhaps the best line he managed:

"You should have ridden with Jesse James, for all the time you stole from me."

Yeah, we stole your time. And we used ours to give something back....if you were listening.

*No. No. He's a third-rate writer. Lots of writers are, just keep repeating that until you believe it.

"But maaaan, he wrote Trout Fishing in America, maaaan, it's such a cool title maaaan."

....and did you ever read it? Even in Cliff's Notes? Do you think the criterion for awarding Nobel Prizes in literature should be scribbling anarchic crap attacking Western Civilization? Oh, wait.......

The Ivied Inquisitors Strike Again....

I'm not going to delve into the latest witch-hunting indulged in by our supposedly enlightened universities, Nat Hentoff did it better. Who rides to the rescue (besides Hentoff and a few other organizations who are completely principled in their defense of the First Amendment) will be the most interesting outcome of The Case of the Professor Who Cried Wetback. At this point, I wouldn't take 10-1 odds on the ACLU....

While I'm certain that Nat & I could find a great multitude of things to disagree on, he is that rare individual who is able to separate his politics from his principles.