Louis E. Lataif writes in Forbes:

Higher education in America, historically the envy of the world, is rapidly growing out of reach. For the past quarter-century, the cost of higher education has grown 440%, according to the National Center for Public Policy and Education, nearly four times the rate of inflation and double the rate of health care cost increases. The cost increases have occurred at both public and private colleges.

Like many situations too good to be true–like the dot-com boom, the Enron bubble, the housing boom or the health care cost explosion–the ever-increasing cost of university education is not sustainable.

Just 10 years ago the cost of a four-year public college education amounted to 18% of the annual income of middle-income families. Ten years later, it amounted to 25% of that family’s average annual income. The cost of attending a private university is about double the cost of public universities. Think of higher education as the proverbial frog in boiling water. It feels very warm and comfy but soon will be cooked.

Hat tip to Instapundit.

I see it as a smaller thing that is unsustainable within a larger thing that is unsustainable: We are evolving out of a place where, if you don’t produce something, you don’t eat. I suppose that is a good thing, at least at first, but we’re evolving in a constant direction a bit too far. With no signs of slowing down. We’re coming up with more and more ways for more and more people to create livelihoods for themselves without producing anything…you’ve heard the old adage “those who can do, those who can’t teach.” Perhaps private higher-level education is becoming more expensive, not quite so much because those who toil away therein are demanding more lavish lifestyles, but because there are more of them.

The whole thing strikes me as a misdirection. If we’re laboring away to create an advanced society in which everyone has a livelihood, and therefore no one needs to worry about whether they can get ahold of one — how come we have more and more people who make such a livelihood out of dictating who does & who does not deserve to have a livelihood? Should that not be an occupation in recession? In fact, it strikes me as an altogether unintended consequence. If your livelihood consists of handing down decisions on who else is entitled to a livelihood, well obviously that just beats the snot out of a livelihood that is made by working. So the lazy people are going to want the livelihood that consists of dictating who else can have a livelihood, since it doesn’t involve any actual work. This may not be a problem if the lazy people are in the minority. But when the option to be lazy has been around for a little while…lazy people always, and I do mean always, achieve majority status.

Glenn Reynolds says often that this is a “bubble” that is due to burst; whatever cannot continue indefinitely, won’t. To his credit, I have yet to see him declare anyone should seek any measure of comfort from this. They shouldn’t because the bursting of the bubble is going to be ugly. Don’t forget, as higher-level education becomes more and more difficult to acquire, the “hard” qualifications to be acquired from it are on a downslide, which means the qualifications to be expected from those who have not acquired one, are similarly on a downslide.

To put it in simpler terms, if the bubble doesn’t pop soon you’re going to need a Master’s degree to shovel shit out of a stable.

So. You can’t have a livelihood of any kind until someone says you’re entitled to have a livelihood, and for them to even consider saying it you need to attend some semesters and pay a rapidly inflating rate for the privilege. Just to be considered. This is the culmination of our efforts to build a super-sophisticated society in which nobody needs to worry about acquiring a livelihood.

Einstein is reputed to have said you can’t solve a problem with the same mindset that created it. I think that is applicable here.

On Groundhog Day I woke up like I always do, engaged in some carnal delight like I usually do, made the coffee like I always do, took my shower, got dressed, logged on to tweak the brittle liberals like I always do…heh heh. Gathered my gear, kissed my sweetie goodbye and walked over to the garage like I always do. Then I pushed the button on my keychain like I always do and the garage door slid up like it always does.

Something just shy of eight inches. Woops.

I tried it again, with the same results. Eh…this needs some addressing. There’s no other way to get in. After fiddling around for the better part of a minute I saw the problem: The metal door was catching on the bottom of the license plate frame. Did I really park the car that way? Is my memory going?

It turned out, yeah, maybe it is, just not in the way I thought. On Groundhog-Day-Eve, I forgot to set the damn parking brake…

Uff da. If your grandfather lived with you and he pulled these shenanigans, you’d start up with that speech about surrendering the license, right? I think most of us would at least give it some thought. What are the rules for this when you’re forty-four instead of eighty-eight? I think, at my tender age, it’s reasonable to have a one-time pass. Get some yuks in, make sure it doesn’t happen again or else the “it’s time, Grandpa” speechifying will begin in earnest.

Maybe I’m biased, but that seems reasonable. Okay then. How in blazes do I get to work, short of crawling around on the dusty floor like a little kid or something? It’s a li’l four-banger, and about eighty pounds of force disengages the car from the door. But I found it somehow impossible to maintain this while avoiding the beam that disengages the motor; there’s a gentle slope to the cement floor, so the vessel rolls back in place when I stop shoving; and as slow as it’s rolling, it’s so much quicker than the door mechanism. Just a two-by-four to block the tires, and this would be so much easier. But there is none.

I ended up sticking my foot in there to jam the Leatherman tool I carry on my belt, under the tire. And, mercifully, the first Groundhog Day misadventure was at an end. Yet another triumph for American ingenuity. Just imagine calling a tow truck over something like this…yikes…forget about drivers’ licenses, let’s talk about Man Cards. What does a tow truck driver’s hysterical laughter sound like? I’m happy to plead an honest ignorance on this point, like any proper red-blooded meat-eating beer-drinking Leatherman-carrying American man.

But clearly I’m fallible, and you have some idea of just how fallible I can be at times…

And so it arrives as something of a shock when I see things like this:

One of my favorite bloggers is Morgan Freeberg a.k.a. House of Eratosthenes. He is able to explain things clearly, although not always concisely. Simple ideas or complex ideas, when Morgan gets a hold of it, he can boil it down to something that is understandable. I urge you to make him a daily stop.

But I was a little dismayed when he rather off-handedly remarked that he didn’t like fisking, musing that doing so usually didn’t add anything to a discussion.

Of course, I’ve been doing a weekly (more-or-less) fisking of a liberal columnist for several years now. I don’t think Morgan’s comment was directed at me, because those fiskings are on a more obscure website that is more of a diary than a blog, but I did take it as whispered advice from an older brother. I hold Morgan’s advice in high regard, so whenever he expresses an opinion, I weight it a bit more than other people’s words. So I quit doing fiskings and figured that I would never do them again.

Until now.

Oh, dear. Maybe the blogs are enhancing our ability to communicate a little bit too well; we have some ditz who can’t even park his car & set the brake, making an off-hand comment about not liking the fisking, and because of that one thing we have some potentially wonderful writing dribbling off into oblivion.

I am not inclined to refudiate the remark about fisking; as a general rule, I still don’t like it. It encourages an intellectual vigor that is broad but not deep. The message behind it is one of “look how gloriously flawed my target must be, for behold the vast quantity of flaws I have uncovered in his work.” But what does that say, really, when you waded into the exercise with that very preconceived notion. And so you began with the intent of finding a bunch of flaws…you found them…this usually says more about you than it does about the thing you’re fisking. And when it says more about you than it does about the thing you’re fisking, and the goal was to say something about the thing you’re fisking, then what we have created is an abomination in that it appears to have met a goal when it really fell short.

That is my objection — it does not apply to what Captain Kardde jotted down after the “until now.” You do need to go read that, it is really something. The target of the fisking has it comin’. When I read things like this (comments by Bob Scott, target-of-fisking, in italics):

Even though I am not willing to conclude that the hatred spouted by conservatives like Sarah Palin and Glenn Beck (Fox News) is responsible for the shooting of U.S. Rep. Gabrielle Giffords and the distinguished chief judge of the U.S. District Court for Arizona, along with five other Americans,

That’s mighty white of you, Bob. Seeing as how that’s what the evidence has proven.

…it is time for conservatives to examine that possibility.

Oh. I see. So, conservatives and the “hatred” that we have “spouted” are not responsible for the shooting, but we need to examine the “possibility” that we are.

It all makes perfect sense!

Aw fuck it, fisk away. What an insufferable jackass.

Anyway, in the evening I came home to an empty house because the girlfriend is taking evening classes. I’d much rather come home to find her, but in her place I found the two dozen St. Pauli’s I’d stocked in the outdoor (daddy) fridge the night before, a package from older relative containing a book called “The No-Asshole Rule: Building a Civilized Workplace And Surviving One That Isn’t“; and, Season One of the Six Million Dollar Man, produced for the first time on DVD Region 1 — yes! Plus a bowl of shake-n-bake chicken drumsticks in the (momma) fridge.

The slow motion, I have to say, has not aged well. In fact, the timing of the story in these episodes is much more tedious and plodding than how I remember. Maybe that’s because when I was seven I was just waiting for Steve Austin to jump over a wall or hit somebody. Another thing that I find interesting is that the influence of James Bond was much more perceptible than the way I remember it. Col. Austin is not just bionic, he’s a man’s man, capable of seducing any woman, relocating an engine from a pickup truck into an airplane, designing some super-world-saving-ramshackle device on the spot, apparently has an IQ of over 200 or so. Since he’s fighting bad guys who really have to be stopped, it goes without saying that he must work for some super-secret government agency. It’s an interesting comment on the times in which we lived back then; I wonder if it would have been possible to make this a couple years later, with Watergate & all. In fact, I’d wager not. Knight Rider did exactly the same thing, but he worked for “The Foundation.”

But still. In that subsequent era, with our confidence completely blown, when you went to the boob tube the real shadowy guys who were up to no good never worked for the government. Sure, you could tell they were bad because they wore nice suits…all the time…even in the middle of the night. Good guys wore plaid shirts unbuttoned down to the navel, and jeans that were skin tight up top around the derrier, flowing like draperies down by the ankles. Suit == bad. But the bad guys weren’t government agency employees, they were super rich megalomaniacs running large corporations. See the little twist? Government screws up…and in our national consciousness, this means free enterprise cannot be trusted.

Another thing that has not aged well from this show, and it is more central to the costuming issue: Steve’s clothes. I can see exactly what they’re getting across — here the scientists and generals and Oscar are briefing Steve on his next mission, and if you’re seeing this for the first time you can tell this guy in the middle of the room is the cool one because he’s a fashion plate. That’s how it looks in 1973. Nowadays, you look at it and go, why is that man wearing a carpet for a suit?

To the asshole book: Wish it arrived twenty years earlier, I could’ve used something like that. By sheer coincidence, Severian posted a comment, also on Groundhog Day, that said

This is why the left almost always wins. Bureaucracies only work when workplaces are harmonious, and so they create elaborate structures to enforce harmony. Since leftists are offended by almost everything, those enforcement structures err on the side of caution and begin enforcing mandatory leftism. And on and on the vicious circle spins…

And here we come to another elaborate thought about workplaces. Chapter four, “How To Stop Your Inner Jerk From Getting Out,” concentrates on avoiding the zombie characteristic of asshole-mania, how to keep from becoming one after you have been bitten. Perhaps this is where the relative wants me to concentrate my energies, I don’t know. It’s chock full of advice and has a self-assessment.

I’m pleased and proud to report that, of all the people who shared a difficult workplace with me and nurtured or became inextricably devoted to the thought that I’m an asshole, their thinking went something like this: Morgan isn’t doing every little thing, large & small, exactly the way I’d be doing it if I were Morgan, that makes him an asshole. And you know what, I’ll take that. I think something needs to be faced here, the word “asshole” is not so much a word that serves to insult, as a word that serves to dismiss. Once you go through life saying “I seek to dismiss any & all persons who do not do things exactly the same way I would do them,” then I submit you do not need to take an asshole self-assessment quiz, we already know the answer…such a being is lower than anybody who ever fisked somebody, or anybody who ever got fisked even if they had it coming.

And this ties in to Severian’s comment. If you have a workplace that is harmonious only because some busybody is “enforcing harmony”…and that busybody, or someone who shares a factional agenda with the busybody, is “offended by almost everything” — how harmonious is that workplace going to be? To paraphrase Stalin, it doesn’t matter who is the asshole, it matters who counts the assholes and therefore defines the assholes.

More than once I have wondered, how do we explain this to future generations? We are going to make our workplaces harmonious, by deferring to the opinions of self-appointed dictators in determining what is “offensive”…oh, and the dictators will generally be self-appointed on the basis of being super-sensitive to perceived slights. That is what makes our workplaces so flexible, so friendly, so welcoming. Above all, non-threatening. That is the paramount goal, so since that goal is higher than any other, we will achieve it by making sure your minute-to-minute behavior, actual & perceived, is adjudicated by some frenzied neurotic you’ve never met, who never had to convince anybody that he or she can be fair or impartial…someone who might very well be nuts. We will end your career over this. We’ll send you to special classes to make sure you understand these are the rules, so you know ahead of time that you are toiling eight hours a day under the Sword of Damocles.

That this creates a non-threatening business environment, is something that will be much more difficult to explain to future generations than — well, The Six Million Dollar Man’s leisure suit.

So there you have a day in the life. Groundhog Day. It covers a lot of subjects, and perhaps in the elaborate treatise above I have managed to tie all of them neatly together. Except for Steve Austin who’s just sort of sticking out there. But he’s cool like that. Nga nga nga nga nga nga nga nga nga….

Rudy Barnett and Elizabeth Foley, WSJ:

For months, progressives smugly labeled the legal challenges to ObamaCare as “silly” or even “frivolous.” Today their confidence must be severely shaken.

Late Monday afternoon in Pensacola, Fla., U.S. District Court Judge Roger Vinson delivered the second major judgment that the centerpiece of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act—the “individual mandate” that forces Americans to buy health insurance whether or not they want it—is unconstitutional.
:
Consider the problems posed by the insurance mandate. The Obama administration argued that it was supported by the Commerce Clause, which gives Congress the power to regulate interstate commerce. True enough, insurance is commerce, but not buying insurance is the antithesis of commerce. Commerce has always been understood as requiring economic activity. This was the rationale Judge Hudson adopted in striking down the individual mandate in the Virginia case.

Since this weekend, just before the ruling, I was treated to a dedicated lefty on the Hello-Kitty-of-Blogging who beat me upside the head (since I was the only one foolish enough to actually debate him on this) that this ruling is inconsequential because it WILL be overturned. Not quite so much that the ruling is wrong, that we need ObamaCare, millions and millions cannot get any access to health care blah blah blah…although there were some trace amounts of that. But it WILL be overturned, it doesn’t matter whether it’s right or wrong, I’ve proven my intellectual feebleness by expressing any sort of belief that the ruling means anything at all.

And oh by the way, my argument has been judged by these authoritative yet virtually anonymous busybodies on social media and found wanting.

But, back to the argument that it doesn’t matter what’s right or wrong, what the Constitution says, this WILL be overturned. Reminds me of the argument that it doesn’t matter if the Victory Mosque should or shouldn’t be built, it WILL be…hey, how’d that turn out. But the decision WILL be overturned. Wow, someone somewhere must have a sweetheart deal for Justice Kennedy.

I irritated the busybody and his sidekick with a hypothetical about a future America vigorously shoving a nascent socialized-medicine system through its early evolutionary stages…and running headlong into an “emergency” kidney shortage. If the government can do anything it wants, since it is “judicial activism” to merely declare anything at all unconstitutional…can the government order me to surrender one of my healthy kidneys? This met with two responses, both peppered with insults, each starkly contradictory to the other: Your hypothetical is unlikely, fantastic and stupid — and, who in pity fuck’s sake ever said your kidneys weren’t up for grabs from the very beginning?

All of which demonstrates two things.

One, those who have no love at all of liberty, principles of self-governance, self-direction, self-ownership and freedom…are viscerally resentful and angry toward those who do. It has been ever thus.

And two: Our lefties are experiencing a difficult time right now. Please be more considerate and gentle than I am.

Look what Cassy posted on her Facebook wall:

Men should concentrate on playing with their children and leave the care to women

Fathers should stick to just playing with their children as their efforts to look after them just end in arguments with their wives, a study claims.

I defer to my own wisdom on this…

It’s very simple; up until 1960, the world was run by white men in black socks. Since 1970, it’s run by women who like to complain about things. So of course we need to get ready for next year’s study that says men aren’t helping out enough…

As you read through about the study, one thing jumps out. Yep, you guessed it…one researcher, who seems to be functioning in a dictatorial capacity in reporting the findings and likely in conducting the study itself, a female with a hyphenated name. No reassurance whatsoever that the conclusions of the study were based in any way on the data the study found…just a belief arranged by legacy protocol, nothing more than that.

In fact, toward the end of the article, a confession of sorts:

The results fit into her other work, which has found that mothers can act as “gatekeepers” to their children, either fostering or restricting how much fathers are involved in caring.

I sense that lately the eggheads are getting more brazen about this thing…this, pop in with an agenda, figure out what you want the study to say, go through the motions of a “study,” come to the conclusion you wanted to come to from the very beginning, work the agenda forward. They seem to be putting less effort into hiding it. In years past, a passage like “The findings in the study remained the same even when the researchers compared dual and single-income families, and when they took into account a wide variety of other demographic factors…” would have been implicitly interpreted as: The findings in the study would remain the same even if other research teams were measuring them.

Nowadays, maybe I’m imagining this, but there seems to be an unwritten undertone permeating throughout that says: “The findings in the study remained the same and they always will remain the same, because we’re the ones doing it.” As in…who cares if we’re measuring it in an objective, reproducible way or not? It’s a study, we’ve got it, and we’ve got our diplomas too. Like it or not, you’ll be living your life the way we want you to inside of five years, ten tops.

In this case, with mothers as the active parent, and fathers as the passive one. Like cattle, in other words. Nice.

How come it is that academics and the left…but I repeat myself…seem so everlastingly intent on bullying people to live like some kind of animal species that is not people?

…say the seven out of ten.

Seven in 10 Americans would like to see Republican leaders in Congress consider the tea party movement’s ideas as they confront the country’s challenges, a new poll has found.

In a Gallup/USA Today polling released Monday, 71 percent of those surveyed said they want to see GOP leaders look to tea party positions when developing policy. Forty-two percent said that listening to tea party ideas was “very important,” while another 29 percent said it was “somewhat important.”

Support for congressional GOPers to adopt tea party positions was strongest among Republicans, with 88 percent saying it was important for party leadership to take tea party ideas into account. Fifty-three percent said it was very important and 35 percent said it was somewhat important.

The remaining three in ten thought it was tragic when Keith Olbermann’s show ended, and also agreed that President Bush caused 9/11. Probably eat their own dung, too.

No, I’m making all that stuff up…because I kind of have to. I don’t know who those people are, I don’t know where I’d be able to find them if I wanted to, and I don’t want to. You can see from reading further in the article this has nothing to do with whether the respondent personally approves of the GOP, or of the TP. The question is — should the former listen to the latter.

Maybe, I suppose…if they’re decent people…but have been living under a rock. An enormous rock. Short of that, and wanting the Republicans to remain a minority party forever, why would you say no? What would be the rationale? The letter “R” is just groovier than the letter “D” or something? I don’t get it.

…anytime they find out my DVR is taping Sarah Palin’s show.

Isn’t it awkward when there’s something to celebrate, and it’s worth some heap-big imbibing but it happens on a Monday? Just dang.

CNS News is flashing back to our lefty pals saying this wouldn’t be a prob-a-luhm. Woops.

As Allahpundit points out, this is not the final battle in the war because it’s a lower court ruling. I think Allah is making a big mistake in minimizing this though. The casual observer can now see this is a real problem; Sen. Leahy can’t just authoritatively intone “nobody questions it” and make the problem go away. Now it has to be taken seriously. That will cause, at the very minimum — granting the other side the benefit of the doubt, that the constitutional question will eventually be satisfactorily resolved — a devastating loss of momentum. And that’s at the very least. That is presuming the constitutional authority can eventually be found…or…conjured up.

pickelsgap, like many, relishes the most satisfying statement in Judge Vinson’s decision (on p. 42):

It is difficult to imagine that a nation which began, at least in part, as the result of opposition to a British mandate giving the East India Company a monopoly and imposing a nominal tax on all tea sold in America would have set out to create a government with the power to force people to buy tea in the first place.

Margot at Reelgirl wants to re-define something.

I began to wonder how one — how we — might take the wussy out of pussy.

Is it possible to change the meaning of the word, to restore to “pussy” its deserved glory? Could we use pussy as a compliment? Could pussy denote someone or something as cool or heroic or impressive? “Rosa Parks — what a pussy!” or “John McCain is way pussy!” or “New York is a big ol’ pussy!”

At the moment, “pussy” isn’t even used to slight women directly. It is reserved for men, used among them to make fun of one another. It’s “sissy” for male heteros. It’s the politically correct big boy’s way of calling somebody a fag. And, please, don’t get me started on “pussy-whipped.”

People say “dick,” they say “asshole,” they say “prick,” but they do it with respect. Those words have power and punch, the way the word “cunt” has power. But “cunt” makes people shudder; they judge, perhaps wrongly, the user of the word. Meanwhile, poor “pussy” lies there limp, pathetic and, until this moment, defenseless.

Hmmm…I don’t know. As always, there is the weakness always inherent in any centralized attempt to re-define words: the decision ultimately belongs to those who use the words. Dictionary editors may say what they like, feminists may angrily stomp their little feet, but ultimately the final say on what a word means, belongs to an unwritten compact between the sender and the receiver of messages containing the word. The meaning is defined as it is put to use; and, between those two mighty dictators, it is the sender of the message who is dominant.

In fact I would say among all the latter-twentieth-century forces of revolution — and, in western culture, there have been many — this is the single lodestar of failure. The attempt to dabble in our lexicon. The benefits have been slight and the resentment it arouses is strong.

But Margot’s a bright gal in her own way. I think this was written up as a joke.

The passage about dick, asshole and prick being used with respect, however, is completely lost on me. I don’t recognize any such meaningful distinction, at least not along the axis of true respect. Pussy/asshole/prick are all male epithets; you take a Christian name that enjoys androgynous potential, like Lynn, Hayden, Riley — or, uh, Morgan maybe? — and tell me some complete stranger by this name is a pussy or a dick, in either case I know with almost absolute certainty you’re talking about a dude. No really, try it. That Morgan is a real prick. That Morgan is a pussy. Morgan is an asshole. Try to envision that the speaker is talking about a chick. It just doesn’t work.

The other equivalence between pussy and dick/asshole/prick is that in all these cases, you’re using a body part to describe a male subject’s abject uselessness. What really varies is the situation. “Pussy” is when you’re married to the guy, you hear a noise in the house at three in the morning and you want him to go check it out with a baseball bat and he won’t go: What a pussy! It means he’s useless. It’s a way of saying “what’s the point of having men around if they’re all like you?”

Dicks, pricks and assholes are equally useless just in different situations. You’re doing your taxes and your buddy turns up the stereo. Of course, to be a dick, this doesn’t qualify unless he knows you’re trying to do your taxes and turns up the stereo on purpose. What a dick. Again, useless. You need that guy around like you need an extra dick, or an extra asshole. On your forehead.

We see, here, why feminism has come to be irrelevant. People don’t like to be told by strangers what words they’re supposed to use for what purpose…or what they’re allowed to call Sarah Palin.

You can’t flout society’s rules, make a big show out of doing so, and then insist people start following your rules just because you want them to. I suppose generations ago that was alright; people were less sophisticated and more gullible. In the age of YouTube, this kind of hairpin-inconsistency is a more visible transgression and people are naturally going to have less tolerance for it.

They’re only going to fall for it if they’re complete pussies.

The other thing that thwarts my optimism in this campaign to re-define the word pussy, is that the word can only be given a new purpose if it is completely deprived of an older purpose. And “pussy” has an absolutely indispensable purpose, recognizable immediately to any man who’s had to conjure up manhood within a budding boy. If I call you a nancy-boy, a sissy, a creampuff, a lightweight, a milquetoast, a geek, nerd, flake, or any of the other derivatives…it means you need to man-up. It means I am desiring that you show some masculine attributes you have hitherto been derelict in showing.

But if I call you a pussy — it means you’d better do it because your momma and grandma aren’t here to protect you. If they were, of course, I’d be using one of those more delicate derivatives. You had better start being a man because right now you are among men. Which, in turn, also implies that we’re doing manly things of the “hold my beer and watch this” variety…things that probably have something to do with lighting fuses and running like hell. It is a reminder that your dainty disposition is dangerously incongruous with our selected pastime. This is not for pussies. Man up or go wait in the truck, pussy.

From The Borderline Sociopathic Blog For Boys, hat tip to blogger friend Daphne.