Barely a day goes by in my office when I don’t hear the word “materialism”. Interestingly, it’s often uttered in a negative tone, and my response is met with varying levels of acceptance. In short, I don’t believe there’s such a thing as “materialism.” All of us need and want material things. It’s only a matter of degree. “Need and want” can be exceeded when one becomes a slave to their possessions.
Material things exist for our pleasure, not the other way around. It might sound crazy to suggest that objects can control people, but material things control some people simply because they allow them to. It’s perfectly fine to celebrate life by enjoying physical possessions. But it’s quite another to feel like you’ve got to have more and more “stuff” in order to keep up. That’s when the things start to control you.
This issue can become more apparent during hard economic times. Some people struggle to keep food on the table and the mortgage paid, while others just cut back on discretionary spending. I’m not making light of bad economic times, but how well you cope with cutting back is an indication of how trapped you are by your trappings. Again, this is not a lecture on the “evils” of materialism. I don’t buy into that. We all need to experience progress, and economic setbacks shouldn’t be the norm. Progress like we currently enjoy is certainly a good thing in a society where people are committed to being free, productive and self-responsible. But progress should be for ourselves, not for the sake of the things we own.
Dependence on material things can result from feelings of inadequacy. An article in Psychology Today described a woman in Manhattan who “believes her own materialism is rooted in shameful feelings about her home life: She grew up poor, raised by grandparents with Depression-era values who forced her to wash tinfoil for reuse. Her outstanding abilities [in sports] gave her entrée to exclusive team clubs, and through those [she] was exposed to the lifestyles of wealthy people. She felt inadequate in comparison. Buying the right things became a way for her to attain a sense of parity.”
Feelings of inadequacy can drive people to acquire material things in order to appear better than others, or because of an irrational fear of rejection. Things exist for your pleasure. They are to be owned. Once they own you, you’re in trouble.
Another unhealthy reason for acquiring material things is to reduce anxiety. Buying what you need is a good way to distract yourself and relax. But shopping shouldn’t be a way to ignore what’s causing you to be anxious in the first place. If you’re buying things you can’t afford, ask yourself, “What am I really anxious about?” Hide the credit cards until you figure it out.
Capitalism and business get the blame for people’s shopping compulsions. That’s like blaming air for the fact that people say stupid things. Getting rid of air is not the solution for stupid statements, just as getting rid of capitalism and freedom isn’t the solution for foolish spending. Businesses exist to please customers and make a profit. If customers decide something is no longer profitable, businesses will stop doing it. The fault lies with our own actions. Blaming others is just an easy way out.
Should you sometimes spend money on things you like? Of course! Material things have their place, but they’re not the only way to be fulfilled. It’s not about “making do with less”; it’s about becoming less dependent on money as the way to enjoy life.
People are always concerned about living within their means, and making sure objects don’t control you is a way to ensure that you can do that. If you must have unlimited access to spending in order to be happy, then you’re going to eventually run out. Why live that way? The trappings of life can be a big part of life — but be careful not to get trapped by the trappings.
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Most Democrats want their party to “become more progressive,” and say they agree with the more aggressive stance being taken by lawmakers like Sen. Bernie Sanders and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez who are calling on the party to take a “more aggressive stance” against President Donald Trump and his administration, according to new polls.
A poll from Survey USA, taken from April 2-6 of 859 Republicans and 885 Democrats, showed that 50% of Democrats want their party to become more progressive, with 24% wanting it to stay the same, and 18% calling for it to become more moderate, reports Real Clear Polling.
Among Republicans, 40% said their party should become more conservative while 44% said it should remain the same.
The polling comes after the Democrats’ losses of both chambers of Congress and the White House, leaving the party looking at how to move forward.
Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., and Sanders, I-Vt., representing the progressive wing of the party, have been drawing crowds of tens of thousands with their “Fighting Oligarchy Tour,” which has them speaking in Democrat-heavy locations such as Los Angeles and Denver and in Republican states such as Idaho and Montana.
Their tour also appears to be paying off for Ocasio-Cortez’s fundraising efforts. She raised $9.6 million in the first three months of this year, more than double what she raised in her second-highest quarter, reports Politico.
She now has more than $8 million in cash-on-hand, according to fundraising reports from the Federal Elections Commission filed Tuesday.
Progressives are also calling on her to launch a primary challenge in 2028 against Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y.
Sanders and Ocasio-Cortez have been speaking out in part in their rallies against the roles of Elon Musk and other billionaires in Trump’s administration, and polls are showing that many Democrats are skeptical of massive cuts in government spending.
In a Harvard-Harris poll taken on April 9-10 among 2,236 registered voters, 62% of Democrats said their party should oppose the Trump administration’s efforts to reduce government expenditures. However, independents, by 61% said they think Democrats should join in efforts to cut government spending.
The Harvard-Harris poll also asked respondents if they prefer Democrats like Sanders and Ocasio-Cortez, “who are calling on Democrats to adopt a more aggressive stance towards Trump and his administration and fight harder,” or moderate Democrats “who are willing to compromise on Trump issues important to their base.”
The poll showed that 72% of Democrats say they prefer more progressive party members like Sanders and AOC.
Republicans, however, said they support moderate Democrats who will compromise with their party, and independents, by 56%, said they would support the more moderate Democrats over hardliners.
The preferences are also showing in favorability polls on the lawmakers, according to recent Economist/YouGov polling.
Schumer scored a 42% favorability rating among Democrats, but AOC’s favorability was at 66%. Sanders’ rating was even higher, with 80% of Democrats and 42% of independents having a favorable opinion of him. Only 11% of Democrats and 32% of independents had a negative opinion of the Vermont senator.
Pope Francis’ recent appearance in St Peter’s, which stunned the world, is the latest and most striking demonstration of how, in complete contrast to his predecessor, he has lived his pontificate at the service of his own ideas. A systematic deconstruction of the papacy.
The image of Jorge Mario Bergoglio in a wheelchair, wearing a white long-sleeved vest half covered by a striped poncho, his hair dishevelled and black trousers, is perhaps the most eloquent expression of how he – and his entourage – have understood the papacy, and the umpteenth, perhaps the last, blatant contrast with Benedict XVI.
The latter was aware that Joseph had to disappear so that the Lord could protect his Church through Benedict. He had to be totally absorbed in his ministry, he had to serve this ministry; Ratzinger knew that the Pope no longer had a private life, and even after his resignation he wanted to emphasise that he would not return to a private life. The one chosen to be the successor of the Apostle Peter must “disappear” behind the white robe; his personal thoughts and particular sensitivities no longer count: he, more than any other baptised person, must allow himself to be absorbed by the thought of Christ.
This is how Ratzinger understood his episcopate and his vocation as Prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith; he was no longer a simple theologian – who must also place himself at the service of Revelation and not dominate it – but the guardian of a doctrine that is not his own. And this is how he understood his priestly ministry, especially in its liturgical aspect: the priest is the servant of the mystery he celebrates; his individuality is buried under the sacred vestments so that the rite is preserved and transmitted in all its holiness and purity, without any contamination of personal taste. The way he bowed his head during the celebrations, the correctness of his gestures, the precision of the rubrics, the seriousness of everything, showed the whole world what it means to be a servant of God.
Francis has always done the opposite. He has used his papacy to promote his own ideas and to sideline those he perceives as opponents of his personal agenda. The “Church of Francis” expresses itself in the same way: the priestly and episcopal ministry is mostly experienced as a catwalk for self-promotion, a role of power to impose one’s own desires. The liturgical sphere is no exception: no matter which church you go to, you will find the same Mass, with priests who pour their frustrations into the sacred rite and mould sacred places and rites in their own image and likeness.
There hasn’t been a month since 13 March 2013 in which Francis hasn’t wanted to bend the papacy to serve him and his ideas, sometimes explicitly, sometimes implicitly. And not only the papacy: justice, doctrine, the structure of the Church, everything has been transformed to serve the project and the person of Jorge Mario Bergoglio. This presentation of himself as a simple man in a wheelchair in the Vatican Basilica – whether it was his decision or not, it doesn’t matter – is just the logical conclusion of one of the most narcissistic pontiffs in the history of the Church. Benedict XVI, perhaps wrongly, wanted to keep the white cassock until the end of his life, even after renouncing the Petrine ministry, in order to emphasise that he continued to be at the service of the Church, totally united to it; Francis wanted to abandon it while he was still Pope, showing how uncomfortable he was wearing the sign of total submission to God and the Church.
Because the beginning and the end of authority in the Church is precisely this: total submission to God. And all the more so for the Successor of Peter, who must always remember that the faith he is called to confirm does not come from flesh and blood, and that it is precisely when humanity prevails that Peter deserves to be called “Satan” by the Lord (cf. Mt 16:13-23).
If there is a sovereignist in the world, it is the Pope”, Gian Franco Svidercoschi – a well-known Vaticanist, certainly not suspected of ‘backwardness’ – said with great clarity when he was a guest of Giovanni Minoli on the popular Italian television programme La Storia Siamo Noi on 2 April. Under the guise of the Synodal Church, a degenerate stepchild of conciliar collegiality, Francis has created the most absolutist pontificate in history, trampling on cardinals and bishops as if they were nothing more than a footstool. Svidercoschi also destroys another myth, answering the question of whether Francis’ pontificate has led to a more inclusive Church with a resounding no. And he adds, just to dot the i’s and cross the t’s, that “the Church of Francis has lost a lot, a lot, a lot of moral authority”. A Church that is not only less inclusive, but also more divided: “There are supposed reforms or changes that he has made that have broken the Church… Whereas before there was a division at the top, now there is a division among the people of God’.
But Svidercoschi really got to Francis when he delivered the epigrammatic verdict on the pontificate now in decline: “For ¾ of his pontificate, the absolute was missing. God was missing’. Not exactly a detail for the Vicar of Christ on earth. Strong words, but true. Francis’ desire to be the centre of attention has ended up obscuring God and degrading the papacy, and this new stunt of appearing in public in his “pyjamas” is further confirmation of this, after the various good mornings and good evenings, the appearances on Fazio, the little jokes about nuns being spinsters and parents having children like rabbits.
We make a plea to the Cardinals: choose a man who will serve the Papacy and not a man who puts the papacy at his personal service.
Another federal circuit judge has blocked President Trump from doing … fill-in-the-blank. It really doesn’t matter. This was all planned during the Obama and Biden regimes, to appoint lawless, totalitarian judges in case a Republican who meant business ever occupied the Oval Office again.
Deport her. Deport all of them. These judges enjoy no individual rights under the Constitution. They are at war with our Constitution, explicitly and openly. They are obliterating our rights and undermining every attempt we make to restore America to its original foundation — or even to where it was in 1990, or 2000.
“We can’t do that,” you say. “It will mean we are a dictatorship.” Wrong. It’s a dictatorship now. Right now, we are living under the rule of these radical, totalitarian judges reinforcing the power of the dictatorship and oligarchy we thought we got rid of in November.
Arrest, deport and stop them. Treat them as enemy combatants, because they are. Remove totalitarians from office. If we don’t, America is finished and the last election did not matter.
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Democrats: The champions of human traffickers, gender dysphorics, violent gang members and economic feudalism.
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It’s not “authoritarian” to stop giving Harvard and Columbia millions to teach young people to be America-hating totalitarians.
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Words and anger will not defeat totalitarians taking over America. Only action will. President Trump, you are our last chance.
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Trump has called on Congress to completely defund NPR, PBS.
Congress has no business sending taxpayer money to any media network, ever. Nothing in the Constitution requires or permits it. Still, some insist we “need” public broadcasting. Why? We already have TONS of left-wing, statist, fascist, totalitarian-supporting media. To name a few: NBC, CBS, CNN, ABC, MSNBC, The New York Times, and virtually every newspaper, and college media, in America. Not to mention the free airtime to socialist, woke causes given by nearly every rock star, actor, celebrity and sports figure in America.
When will leftists ever feel they have enough?
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Back on February 14, I had a post titled “How Much Of This Has Been Paid For By The U.S. Taxpayer?” The post asked that question about a sample of issues held dear by the Left: migrant caravans, services in the U.S. to illegal aliens, DEI and climate alarm.
Over the intervening weeks it has become clear that the general answer is “a lot of it,” but the details will be slow to emerge. For example, you can go to the website of DOGE and get an endless list of hundreds of contracts and grants that have been reduced or canceled. But they all seem to have legitimate headlines or titles, even if they were wasteful. How much of this money was getting diverted to an NGO, and from there to another NGO and then another until it ended up funding migrant caravans or pro-Palestinian propaganda or some other such cause. There is very little indication.
Certainly, you can count on the biggest left-wing grant recipients to be less than honest in defending their fiefdoms. Consider, for example, Harvard University. It’s been big news the past couple of days that Harvard has refused to knuckle under to President Trump’s demands that it rein in anti-semitism, in order to retain its many hundreds of millions, if not billions, of dollars of annual federal funding. Harvard President Alan Garber defended the university’s position in an email addressed to the “Harvard Community” that is publicly available here. Here’s how it starts out:
For three-quarters of a century, the federal government has awarded grants and contracts to Harvard and other universities to help pay for work that, along with investments by the universities themselves, has led to groundbreaking innovations across a wide range of medical, engineering, and scientific fields. These innovations have made countless people in our country and throughout the world healthier and safer. . . . These partnerships are among the most productive and beneficial in American history. New frontiers beckon us with the prospect of life-changing advances—from treatments for diseases such as Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s, and diabetes, to breakthroughs in artificial intelligence, quantum science and engineering, and numerous other areas of possibility. For the government to retreat from these partnerships now risks not only the health and well-being of millions of individuals but also the economic security and vitality of our nation.
It all looks like mis-direction to me. How much of Harvard’s federal funding goes to the widely-supported subjects that Garber lists — Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s, diabetes, AI, quantum science and engineering? Clearly a small minority. And how much goes to garbage like, for example, climate alarm? Garber won’t even mention that one, nor will he provide a quantitative breakout of how much federal taxpayer money Harvard sends down that particular rathole. If you wish, you can go to the Harvard website, where you will find an unbelievable profusion of climate alarm initiatives, for example the Harvard University Center for the Environment/Climate, Harvard University Climate Solutions, Harvard Business School Confronting Climate Change, the Harvard Radcliffe Institute Climate Change Initiative, Harvard School of Public Health Center for Climate, Health and the Global Environment, etc., etc., etc. There are many more. It is a fair bet that all of these are majority federally funded, and that few if any of them would exist at all without the federal largesse.
More generally, here is an article from Harvard Magazine in 2022 that breaks down the faculty of Harvard’s “Arts & Sciences” divisions between science, humanities and social sciences. (“Arts & Sciences” excludes the professional schools like Law, Medicine and Business.). In round numbers, it’s 40% science and 60% humanities and social sciences. Garber doesn’t even try to defend anything in the majority consisting of humanities and social sciences. A huge percentage of that is America hatred and Marxism. Granted, the humanities and social sciences get far fewer federal grants; but they benefit from the gigantic “overhead” allowances that Harvard has attached to its science and medical grants.
And I haven’t even gotten to Harvard’s tolerance of anti-semitism. On that subject, the Harvard Jewish Alumni Association commented today on X: “Harvard’s fighting the Trump administration harder than it’s ever fought antisemitism.”
On the question of federal funding for the migrant invasion, again nothing yet coming out of DOGE-land enables any kind of overall quantification. Glenn Reynolds (of Instapundit) has an op-ed in today’s New York Post that compiles some prior Post reporting on the subject. The title is “How Democrats used NGO’s to end-run voters.” Reynolds:
[A]s we’ve learned recently, partly as the result of Department of Government Efficiency digging, many “non-governmental” entities are really just fronts for government activities that Americans would never stand for if Washington attempted them directly. For example, America’s border crisis was funded in large part by President Joe Biden’s government, which sent large sums of money in the form of grants to various NGOs that helped train migrants on how to get to the United States — and how to claim asylum when they arrived.
Most significantly, Reynolds links to this February 1 Post piece reporting that Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem had terminated some $1.4 billion of funding for 2025 to some 15 UN agencies and 230 (!) NGOs that were involved in some way in providing services to the migrants. That is undoubtedly the tip of the iceberg.
A huge and barely-explored question remains, which is how much federal funding finds its way via various NGOs to Democrat-supporting political groups? A tantalizing hint emerged on March 27, when a gun-control group called March for Our Lives suddenly laid off 13 of its 16 paid staffers. March for Our Lives is the group founded by anti-gun activist David Hogg, the same guy who got elected Vice Chair of the DNC on February 1. The stated mission of MFOL is “voter engagement” on the gun control issue. Go to the tax filings of MFOL, and you will not find any disclosures of who the donors are. At a Facebook page called “Donald Trump for President” (I’m not sure that this is a valid Trump page) it is alleged that MFOL suffered a “drastic collapse in donations via ActBlue immediately following Trump’s closure of USAID.” So, was MFOL funded via funds laundered from grants originally coming from USAID? It is certainly a reasonable hypothesis, although at this point I cannot find definitive confirmation. Maybe one of the readers can find that. I do not know of any other reason why funding for an anti-gun group, let alone one so high-profile as MFOL, would suddenly evaporate shortly after Trump’s inauguration. You would think that Trump’s inauguration would be energizing the anti-gun groups, rather than the opposite.
So let’s all be on the lookout for Democrat activist groups seeing their ActBlue or other such funding suddenly disappearing. I highly doubt that MFOL will be the only one.
Well-meaning liberal Americans sympathize with the Arab-Palestinian cause because of the group’s determined, decades-long struggle against Israel’s superior military might. Recently, that favoritism among Democrats for the first time shifted to a majority who support the Palestinians over Israel.
But if supporters of the Palestinians knew the whole truth, as the Palestinians tell it, they might reverse their sympathies. Indeed, when we listen to what the Palestinians say, and what they do, their underdog image is betrayed by belligerent goals, cruel methods and values anathema to Western civilization.
Understandably, liberals sympathize with the Palestinians out of “humanitarian” instincts. To them, the Palestinians are an oppressed group fighting bravely for their freedom. These defenders see Israel, the Palestinians’ foe, as having, for 78 years, tried to deny innocent people self-determination and their rightful share of a Middle East homeland.
But this sympathetic portrait of Arab-Palestinians is purely the product of Western projection–an imagined assignment to the Palestinians of motives, goals and values characteristic of a Western mindset. Western liberals are often shocked when they’re exposed to the portrait Palestinians paint of themselves–as Arabs and as Muslims–which embodies characteristics in direct contradiction to peace-loving Western values and aspirations.
Perhaps the most significant reason the Palestinians are still fighting is that Israel and its Western allies continue to offer what we think the Palestinians want–or should want–rather than what they actually do want. Westerners have steadfastly believed that
Palestinians want a state and to live in peace with Israel, and that Israel is preventing the Palestinians from achieving this goal.
The problem turns out to be ours. Palestinians tell us what they want and pursue what they want, but we ignore their message. We prefer our enlightened translation. To gain insight into this contradiction, it helps to highlight exactly what the Palestinians tell us–and what they tell themselves–about their goals and values.
To get a handle on this disconnect, let’s compare Westerners’ two greatest myths about Palestinian goals and values with what Palestinians say and do regarding the major issues affecting peace in the Middle East.
Myth #1: Palestinians want their own state, living in peace beside Israel. The Palestinians flatly reject any Jewish rights to sovereignty in “Palestine,” because they reject the Jews’ historical connection to the Land of Israel. For example, Palestinian Authority leader Mahmoud Abbas, in 2018, bizarrely called Israel a “colonial project” having no basis in history and disconnected from Judaism.
During the Camp David summit in 2000–an attempt by President Bill Clinton to resolve the Israeli-Palestinian conflict with a two-state solution–former PLO chief Yasser Arafat asserted that “Solomon’s Temple was not in Jerusalem, but Nablus.” Clinton was flabbergasted at this outright lie, but Arafat refused to back down, just as he refused the Israeli and American offer of statehood.
Hamas, still the Palestinians’ leading political and military force, maintains in its charter that “The land of Palestine is an Islamic Waqf (endowment) consecrated for future Muslim generations until Judgment Day.” The concept of waqf in Islam implies that it belongs to Muslims exclusively and cannot be shared with infidels, especially Jews.
Furthermore, recent polls show that most Palestinians reject a two-state solution, preferring a single, Arab-ruled state.
Given this religious and political opposition to a Jewish state, it’s no wonder Palestinians teach their children from birth to hate, conquer and kill Jews. Many videos exist on social media that show children saying they want to fight and defeat the Jews.
In short, the notion that Palestinians want a peaceful state next to Israel is betrayed by countless statements from Palestinian political and religious leaders, as well as curricula at every educational level.
Myth #2: Israel is preventing the Palestinians from forming their own state. The United Nations and Israel, with America’s backing, have offered the Palestinians many opportunities to achieve statehood, but the Palestinians and their fellow Arabs have flatly refused every time.
They rejected the 1947 U.N. partition plan. Following the 1967 Six-Day War, Israel offered land it had seized in exchange for peace with its Arab neighbors. The Arab reply? The three “no’s”: no recognition of Israel, no negotiations with Israel and no peace with Israel.
In 2000, 2001 and 2008, Israel again offered the Palestinians statehood–in all of Judea and Samaria (AKA the “West Bank”), with a capital in eastern Jerusalem–but again, the Palestinians said no. Later attempts by U.S. Presidents Barack Obama and Donald Trump were also rejected.
Israel has also attempted numerous programs to assist and build trust with the Palestinians, including inviting hundreds of thousands of Palestinian workers into Israel and providing medical care, water and electricity to Palestinians.
Unfortunately, no Palestinian leader has arisen who advocates prosperity for the Palestinian people and peace with Israel. There is no Gandhi, no Mandela, no peace movement. Rather, Palestinian leaders focus on what they call the “resistance”–the codeword for continued terror, whose goal is the conquest of Israel.
Claims that Israel stands in the way of a Palestinian state are contradicted by a 78-year history of generous offers from Israel to help the Palestinians create one. However, while Israel has never started a war with the Palestinians, it has been forced to defend itself from countless attacks–from terrorist murders to outright wars–by an opponent determined to destroy it.
The liberal West would be smarter to believe what the Palestinians say and do, and not our naive projections. We want to believe that the Palestinians want a state that will exist peacefully alongside Israel. However, the Palestinians themselves tell us they reject Jewish sovereignty in what they view as exclusively Arab-Muslim land.
Westerners also assume that Israel is preventing the Palestinians from achieving self-determination. But history proves otherwise. Israel has made many offers to the Palestinians, who said “no” to each one. Indeed, more often than not, they and their Arab brethren followed up their rejections with violence and bloodshed, forcing Israel into 76 years of defensive actions.
A new book on higher ed’s future should give university presidents pause.
For the entire existence of the James G. Martin Center, we have been arguing that, due to governmental policies, higher education has been badly oversold. That is, many students have been lured into college even though they have little interest in or aptitude for advanced academic studies. The notion that a college degree was a sure-fire investment that would pay off handsomely after graduation was erroneous, but great numbers of students and their families were taken in by that siren song. Moreover, a stigma somehow attached to students who didn’t go to college—if you had to “settle” for working after high school, that was a mark of shame.
The apotheosis of college reached its peak under President Obama, who declared early in 2009 that it must be our national goal to lead the world in the percentage of citizens who have graduated from college. Anyone who disagreed with his idea that college is a national elixir was scoffed at.
A large number of college graduates have ended up working in low-paying jobs that call for no advanced study.One writer who dared to raise doubts about college was Charles Murray. In his book Real Education, he argued that the bachelor’s degree was being forced to do things it was never meant for. He observed that a high percentage of the students enrolling in college weren’t seeking advanced learning; what they wanted and needed was hands-on training for the jobs they would later do. Four or more years of classes and papers and exams were mostly a waste of time and money for them.
Nevertheless, the education lobby has continued to declare that the college degree is the best way for almost everyone.In the years since Murray’s book was published, a lot of evidence has come to light that supports his point of view, especially the large number of college graduates who have ended up working in low-paying jobs that call for no advanced study. Nevertheless, the education lobby has continued to declare that the college degree is the best way for almost everyone.
It will be impossible to keep up the cheerleading that college is the key to the American Dream now that Kathleen deLaski’s book Who Needs College Anymore? is out. She has written a deeply thought-out and extensively researched book arguing that new methods for preparing young people for the working world, and, just as important, for helping employers identify those who best suit their needs, are rapidly developing. The days when a college degree was essential will soon be gone.
DeLaski states at the outset, “I believe we are on the cusp of a new era in which college as we know it could become an umbrella descriptor for several proud paths to adultification, skilling, or confidence building. In today’s fluid, do-it-yourself, just in time training culture, 62 percent of Americans are not earning a bachelor’s degree. They are finding alternatives and work-arounds, many hacking their way to sufficiency, a small number to lofty success.”
Echoing Murray, deLaski observes that large numbers of today’s college students never graduate, and, among those who do, many wind up struggling to pay their college loans, working in jobs they could have done without going to college. The good old college experience just isn’t centered on their needs. Fortunately, new technologies are changing that.
What makes this book all the more compelling is the author’s admission that, for many years, she was on the opposite side of the “college for all” debate. She worked for the Student Loan Marketing Association (Sallie Mae), which vigorously pushed the college agenda, since the more students took out loans, the more money it made. And she admits to having used the “but if you don’t go to college, you will end up flipping burgers” line on one of her children. But after years of carefully looking at the way college actually works for students, she came to the realization that few people really need to earn a degree.
The evidence for that conclusion is very persuasive, for example her conversations with lots of young people about their stories—such as the man who earned degrees at Yale and the Wharton School but said that all his studying left him feeling unemployable.
One of the developments now giving people alternatives to the college degree as a means of signaling their employability are bootcamps. They are immersions in skill acquisition that students can use to sell themselves in an expanding range of fields. Bootcamps aren’t brand new—they’ve been around for more than 10 years—so how are they working out? One of deLaski’s stories here is most enlightening.
DeLaski has spoken with employers and learned that they are looking for better ways of identifying talent.A young man who had gone to college and earned a degree in computer science was unable to “launch professionally” and spent several years after college working in retail sales. Then he came across an ad for a bootcamp named Climb Hire, which said it would train people for salesforce-administration jobs and that those who completed the program would owe the $7,200 tuition only if they landed a job paying at least $45,000. Since he was earning only $22,000, he thought he had nothing to lose. So he signed up, learned the material in convenient evening classes, and then found a job paying enough that he was obligated to repay the tuition. Money well spent.
College grads have no loyalty, so employers are starting to “fish upstream.”Bootcamps, deLaski observes, are good at “retrofitting” people who’ve gone to college but have not been able to find a route to success.
What about employers? DeLaski has also spoken with many of them and learned that they are looking for better ways of identifying talent than relying on the presence or absence of a college degree. One executive told her, “I’m not sure I want college graduates. I don’t want all their baggage coming with them. I’m just looking for workers I can train into my industry.”
One problem, he said, is that college grads have no loyalty, so he (and other employers) are starting to “fish upstream,” meaning they try to connect with prospective workers while they are still in high school. They do that by pointing interested students towards bootcamps, community-college classes, certificate programs, or anything else that will give them identifiable skills. With all the information that’s becoming available to employers about those skills, college is more and more an unnecessary middleman.
These kinds of training programs don’t yet exist for many industries, but they are proliferating quickly. So are apprenticeships, and deLaski relates another eye-opening story about a young woman who apprenticed with the insurance company Pinnacol. In high school, she had not figured out what, if anything, she wanted to study in college and was afraid of going into debt for it. When she heard about Pinnacol’s apprenticeship, she decided to give it a try. Now, at 21, she is an underwriter managing 2,000 worker’s-compensation accounts. College for her? Possibly, in the future.
So, where does that leave colleges?
The huge, artificial expansion of demand for college degrees that began with the government’s ill-considered intervention in higher education 70 years ago is going to decrease greatly as students avail themselves of better ways of getting into the world of work. Most schools will have a hard time finding ways to fit into the new reality. Only a rather small percentage of students really need college degrees these days, such as those who want to go into medicine or law, whose professional schools are open only to those with college degrees. (There is no reason for that restriction, and it’s something else that should change.)
DeLaski points to a few colleges that have adapted to the need to offer students what they want rather than the traditional degree, such as Western Governors University. Most colleges, however, will struggle as their market shrinks. They aren’t nimble (as Brian Rosenberg discussed in his book “Whatever It Is, I’m Against It”), and few faculty members have any expertise in teaching the kinds of things students will pay for.
How do you suppose the heads of companies that made vacuum tubes for televisions and radios felt when they first heard about a new technology called the transistor? They realized that it would force them out of business—unless they could somehow find a way to ride the wave of change. If college presidents read Kathleen deLaski’s book, they will have the same sense of foreboding.
George Leef is director of external relations at the James G. Martin Center for Academic Renewal.
For a couple of decades now, I have put out a list of the best and most obnoxious quotes of the year. The most obnoxious quotes always get much more attention for understandable reasons, but that’s just how it is these days, isn’t it? The most outrageous, blood pressure-raising, anger-producing events get all the eyeballs, and the real news, brilliant insights, and uplifting sentiments tend to get ignored.
Well today, we’re going to be giving those “best of” quotes the respect they deserve. What you are about to read is a little snapshot of history, the best quotes from 2014 – to the present. Enjoy!
20) “In the past, if a 21-year-old said they had ‘trauma’, or were on the receiving end of ‘violence,’ it usually meant they’d seen their mates get blown up in the trenches, or had been shot. Now it just means they saw a Tweet.” — Charlotte Gill
19) “Unfortunately, as I tell my white friends, we as black people, we’re never going to be successful, not because of you white people, but because of other black people. When you’re black, you have to deal with so much crap in your life from other black people. It’s a dirty, dark secret; I’m glad it’s coming out.
…One of the reasons we’re never going to be successful as a whole, is because of other black people. And for some reason, we are brainwashed to think, if you’re not a thug or an idiot, you’re not black enough. If you go to school, make good grades, speak intelligently, and don’t break the law, you’re not a good black person. And it’s a dirty, dark secret.
…There are a lot of black people who are unintelligent, who don’t have success. It’s best to knock a successful black person down because they’re intelligent, they speak well, they do well in school, and they’re successful… We’re the only ethnic group who say, ‘Hey, if you go to jail, it gives you street cred.’ It’s just typical BS that goes on when you’re black, man.” — Charles Barkley
18) “Conservatives say ‘you can be somebody.’ Liberals say ‘you should hate somebody.’” — Carl Jackson
17) “If you don’t read the newspaper, you’re uninformed. If you do read it, you’re misinformed… In our society, now it’s just first — who cares, get it out there. We don’t care who it hurts. We don’t care who we destroy. We don’t care if it’s true.” — Denzel Washington
16) “If you want to know who actually has the power in our society and who is actually marginalized, ask which ideas get you sponsorships from Google and Pepsi and which get you fired.” — Kevin Williamson
15) “If progressives have a politics that says all white people are racist, all men are toxic, and all billionaires are evil it’s kinda hard to keep them on your side. If you’re chasing people out of the party, you can’t be mad when they leave.” — Van Jones
14) “What once helped to diminish ancient prejudices was the American creed that no one had a right to discriminate against fellow citizens on the basis of race, gender, class, or religion. And what fuels the return of American bias is the new idea that citizens can disparage or discriminate against other groups if they claim victim status and do so for purportedly noble purposes.” — Victor Davis Hanson
13) “Actually, the idea that governments can spend without any concern for financial return is the fundamental incorrect premise of our time.” — Balaji Srinivasan
12) “Government, we are sometimes told, is just another word for things we choose to do together. Like a lot of things politicians say, this sounds good. And, also like a lot of things politicians say, it isn’t the least bit true. Many of the things government does, we don’t choose. Many of the things we choose, government doesn’t do. And whatever gets done, we’re not the ones doing it. And those who are doing it often interpret their mandates selfishly.” — Glenn Reynolds
11) “Government’s job is not to get you stuff or to get somebody else’s stuff for you. It’s to preserve your liberty.” — Rand Paul
10) “If you want to know how dumb the West has become, people have been arguing about how many genders there are, and if it’s FAIR to allow males to compete against females in competitive sports… For 8 YEARS! No wonder no real progress is being made on anything important.” — Zuby
9) “To me, it’s a sign of intellectual weakness. If you can’t ask Ann Coulter in a polite way questions which expose the weakness of her arguments, if all you can do is boo, or shut her down, or prevent her from coming, what does that tell the world? What are you afraid of? Her ideas? Ask her the hard questions. Confront her intellectually. Booing people down, or intimidating people, or shutting down events, I don’t think that that works in any way.” — Bernie Sanders
8) “We are all descended from slaves. It is just a question of when. Was it more recent or less recent? That’s it.” — Elon Musk
7) “Disagreements become insults when politics becomes a statement about who you are.” — Jonah Goldberg
6) “We are not a nation of immigrants. We are a nation of citizens.” — Mark Levin
5) “The only true test of intelligence is if you get what you wanted out of life.”—Naval Ravikant
4) “You know what woke means, right? It means you’re a loser. Everything woke turns to sh*t.” — Donald Trump
3) “Modern journalism is all about deciding which facts the public shouldn’t know because they might reflect badly on Democrats.” — Jim Treacher
2) “What I see all over the place is people who care about looking good, while doing evil. F*** them.” — Elon Musk
“We are by long odds the most ill-mannered nation, civilized or savage, that exists on the planet today. Our president stands for us like a colossal monument.”–Mark Twain
I have often wondered at the condition of things which set aside morality in politics and make possible the election of men whose unfitness is apparent. We have never had a president before who was destitute of self-respect & of respect for his high office; we have had no president before who was not a gentleman; we have had no president before who was intended for a butcher, a dive keeper or a bully, and missed his mission by compulsion of circumstances over which he had no control.
We are by long odds the most ill-mannered nation, civilized or savage, that exists on the planet today, and our president stands for us like a colossal monument visible from all the ends of the earth. He is fearfully hard and coarse where another gentleman would exhibit kindliness and delicacy.
He became so expert in duplicity, and so admirably plausible that he couldn’t tell himself when he was lying and when he wasn’t. The most outrageous lies that can be invented will find believers if a man only tells them with all his might.
He taught them that the only true freedom of thought is to think as the party thinks; that the only true freedom of speech is to speak as the party dictates; that the only righteous toleration is toleration of what the party approves; that patriotism, duty, citizenship, and devotion to country, loyalty to the flag, are all summed up in loyalty to party. Loyalty is a word which has worked vast harm; for it has been made to trick men into being “loyal” to a thousand iniquities.
It is interesting, wonderfully interesting — the miracles which party-politics can do with a man’s mental and moral make-up. In the interest of party expediency they give solemn pledges, they make solemn compact; in the interest of party expediency, they repudiate them without a blush. They would not dream of committing these strange crimes in private life.
It is an accepted law of public life that in it, a man may soil his honor in the interest of party expediency — must do it when the party requires it. Where the party leads, they will follow, whether for right and honor, or through blood and dirt and a mush of mutilated morals. Here in our democracy we are cheering a thing which of all things is most foreign to it & out of place — the delivery of our political conscience into somebody else’s keeping. This is patriotism on the Russian plan.
Reader, suppose you were an idiot. And suppose you were a member of Congress. But I repeat myself.
We will not hire a blacksmith who never lifted a sledge. We will not hire a school-teacher who does not know the alphabet. We will not have a man about us in our business life, in any walk of it, low or high, unless he has served an apprenticeship and can prove that he is capable of doing the work he offers to do. We even require a plumber to know something about his business, that he shall at least know which side of a pipe is the inside. But when a representative of ours learns, after long experience, how to conduct the affairs of his office, we discharge him and hire somebody that doesn’t know anything about it.
Those burglars that broke into my house recently are in jail, and if they keep on, they will go to Congress. When a person starts downhill, you could never tell where he’s going to stop.
People seem to think they are citizens of the Republican Party and that that is patriotism and sufficiently good patriotism. I prefer to be a citizen of the United States.
My kind of loyalty was loyalty to one’s country, not to its institutions or its officeholders. The country is the real thing, the substantial thing, the eternal thing; it is the thing to watch over, and care for, and be loyal to; institutions are extraneous, they are its mere clothing, and clothing can wear out, become ragged, cease to be comfortable, cease to protect the body from winter, disease and death.
In this country we have one great privilege which they don’t have in other countries. When a thing gets to be absolutely unbearable the people can rise up and throw it off. That’s the finest asset we’ve got — the ballot box.
In a monarchy, the king and his family are the country; in a republic it is the common voice of the people. Each of you, for himself, by himself and on his own responsibility, must speak. Each must for himself alone decide what is right and what is wrong, and which course is patriotic and which isn’t. The citizen who thinks he sees that the commonwealth’s political clothes are worn out, and yet holds his peace and does not agitate for a new suit, is disloyal; he is a traitor.
The political and commercial morals of the United States are not merely food for laughter, they are an entire banquet.
Mark Twain edited by Shelley Fisher
EDITOR’S NOTE: The opinions of Mark Twain are not entirely in agreement with the Artful Dilettante. Just sayin’.
As Americans file their taxes at the last minute this April 15, the federal debt – and Americans’ federal debt burden – continues to grow.
While the federal government reports a national debt nearing $37 trillion, one budget watchdog says the figure is actually much higher: $158.6 trillion, amounting to $974,000 for each federal taxpayer.
Truth in Accounting, a nonprofit budget accountability group that emphasizes a different approach to government accounting, released those figures, arguing that they more accurately represent the fiscal situation of the federal government.
TIA’s report includes $51.6 trillion for Medicare and $67.1 trillion for Social Security for benefits that have been promised to recipients down the road but are not considered in the ordinary national debt conversation.
“These numbers come from the Social Security and Medicare Trustees Reports, which include calculations of the present value of projected benefits over the next 75 years, offset by the dedicated receipts expected over that period,” TIA Founder and CEO Sheila Weinberg told The Center Square. “Our calculations focus only on current participants – we do not include receipts or benefits from future participants.
“For Medicare specifically, in addition to the estimates based on current law, the actuaries also provide projections under the ‘Illustrative Alternative Scenario’… This scenario includes more realistic assumptions about future physician payment rates, and we use the IAS in our estimates.”
For instance, current government debt levels do not take into account the future payments for Social Mecurity and Medicare in the coming years, some of the nation’s biggest and most problematic financial obligations.
“The Treasury Department only included a fraction, $241 billion, of the Social Security and Medicare liabilities on the federal balance sheet because unknown to most people, according to government documents, recipients do not have the right to any benefits beyond the benefits to be paid next month, and laws to reduce or stop future benefits can be passed at any time,” reads TIA’s report, first obtained by The Center Square.
Budget experts have raised the alarm for years about the federal government’s runaway spending – under both political parties – and the threat it poses to the U.S.
“Our country’s financial condition continues to spiral out of control, and taxpayers are left holding the bag,” Weinberg said.
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TIA argues current federal accounting downplays the severity of the U.S. debt problem.
“Nontransparent, flawed budgeting and accounting techniques currently produce inaccurate amounts, making the federal government’s finances difficult, if not impossible, to manage,” the report said. “The first step in managing the nation’s finances should be presenting accurate and transparent figures through full accrual budgeting and accounting that includes the costs and growth in the liabilities related to the two programs our seniors rely on the most, Social Security and Medicare. This would enable Congress, the President, and the American people to make better-informed tax and spending decisions.”
Casey Harper
A/D NOTE: Liberals are completely off their nut. We are nearly $160 trillion in debt and these ignorant marxists are taking to the streets to protest Elon Musk’s sincere, dedicated effort to reduce federal spending by only $1 trillion. That’s his stated goal. Instead of working with the GOP to solve our nation’s fiscal problems, they must resort to violence. They are setting ablaze up his car dealerships, keying Teslas, holding anti-Musk riots against a man who has nothing but the noblest intentions. Violence is their last and only weapon to stop the Trump juggernaut. And if they succeed, our Republic is doomed.
THE ARTFUL DILETTANTE 