Fitting

Somehow these Abandoned Yugoslavia Monuments go well my mood right now.

Haunting, beautiful, and depressing.

Oh well, back to moving. At least it's Friday.

Civilizing Trends.

Breda looks to the future.

Which reminds me of Marko Kloos' classic essay.

And to change things up, here's a basket of puppies.

Yay, GLaDOS made a friend.

I suppose I should explain... here. Bit of a Portal 2 spoiler.

Speaking of friends became a member at a new gun club last night and met Tam and Bobbie. And MCF&G really doesn't do things by halves.

Meanwhile in more enlightened places......

In the UK a Woman tells trespassers, illegally squatting nearby, to not destroy her property. Trespassers get violent. Police are called, and blame her.

The woman committed no crime, and did not even threaten to use her arms, but because the situation arose where she might have to defend herself, the State decided to take her guns away and the ability to purchase more.

That is what gun control is: the State enabling the physically strong, the numerous, and the criminal to prey upon the physically weaker, the few, and the law-abiding.

If every gun vanished do you think that gangs of rowdy trespassing youths would be unable to successfully attack middle-aged women with terminal cancer?

Remember that there are people that want us to emulate these laws.

What is it worth?

Glen Reynolds has talked about the higher education bubble.

A lot.

Now here's Cracked on the same subject with: The Question You're Not Asking: Should You Go To College?


This is how it starts:

If you have (or are currently attending college in pursuit of) an engineering, law, computer science, medical or any other kind of degree that qualifies you to do something with a tangible effect on the world, this is not the column for you. You're not going to get anything out of it. Well, maybe some well-earned Schadenfreude at the expense of all the little grasshoppers who didn't till for winter, but aren't you above all that? Why don't you go somewhere and understand some math, asshole.

For the rest of you, I need to tell you something, and it's probably going to hurt: All that talk about how a higher education improves you as a human being, instantly launches a stellar career and hurls you screaming into the transcendental nirvana of financial stability -- yeah, that was all bullshit. Unless you're going for a professional degree, you really should not go to college.

Yes, Cracked a humor web-magazine for young people is doing something quite subversive. This is also not the first time either. Read their aticle on "5 Things You Think Will Make You Happy (But Won't)" and see the end on what will make you happy.

Edit: Though I don't really agree with the last point. Yes, college will not automatically put you into a "transcendental nirvana of financial stability" but it can still be worth it even if you are not in a "professional" degree. Though given the expense of college, one really has to consider what one wants to get out of all that time and money.

However, this requires a degree of direction and passion...

But then, I never quite understood the professional degree kids who knew exactly what they wanted to do with their lives before they were even legally allowed to smoke. At 18, all I actually "knew" that I wanted to do was girls, bong rips, and handstands - and I never did get that handstand down. We live in a coddling society, and our culture is extending mental adolescence further and further into the late teens and even 20s. I, for example, didn't really feel like a grown, responsible adult male until any day now, hopefully. The kids that have a life-map at 18 were always somewhat rare to start with, and now they're a dying breed. But even the lost teenagers still have that drive. It kicks in the second they get out of high school, and it's propagated by one of the most pervasive PR campaigns ever: "Go to college. You're nothing without a college education. It doesn't matter what you want to do, or even if you know what that is at all. Go to college. College fixes everything."

And why would the government be so gung ho about it -- willing to offer you all that free money (hey, you don't have to pay it back until college is over, and that's a lifetime from now! That's basically not even you anymore! Ha ha, fuck that guy!) - if it just ultimately screws you? Because of something called SLABS. If you haven't clicked on that link, that's okay: You're probably high right now and muddling through the second half of Jackie Brown. You're in no shape for the finer points of finance, but the gist is this: Remember what collapsed the housing market? The repackaged loans being traded with no capital behind them? This is the exact same deal.

Emphasis added this time. This is not a line of thinking you don't normally expect from an "edgy" and funny source, but there it is.

I was one of those "professional degree kids" and knew what I wanted to do and exacly what I wanted out of university. That made things easier.

However, for someone who is looking at a giant money-hole and does not know what they want out of it... well, that's a challenge. It's even more daunting for those that don't even want to go to class, and treat college as four years at an expensive, but crummy, resort.

Read the rest. And realize that some people are looking at higher education as an investment (and a real one not just code for spending money) and weighing the cost versus benefit.

Edit: This is not to say that college (even the non-professional programs) is worthless. On the contrary: this raises the question of what is it worth. Because as a student (or parent) you will pay for your time there. So the question becomes, what is the value you get from the education?

Is it worth the cost and the time? Why are you there? Expanding your horizons and knowledge are laudable goals, but they do not exist in a vacuum.

Whimsical.

Rule of law? Due process?

Nah, let's just have the feds start blacklisting people they don't like.

The Department of Health and Human Services this month notified Howard Solomon of Forest Laboratories Inc. that it intends to exclude him from doing business with the federal government. This, in turn, could prevent Forest from selling its drugs to Medicare, Medicaid and the Veterans Administration. If the government implements its ban, Forest would have to dump Mr. Solomon, now 83 years old, in order to protect its corporate revenue. No drug company, large or small, can afford to lose out on sales to the federal government, a major customer.

Also note that the .gov has gotten so powerful that a medical company cannot stay in buisness without it's custom. Charming.
Ed Morrissey explains what it means:

In other words, the government has decided to arbitrarily decide on punishment without any due process in regard to the individuals involved. The Obama administration wants the power to dictate to the private sector who can and cannot run firms that do business with Washington. I’m not sure even Ayn Rand predicted that in Atlas Shrugged.

It’s not difficult to see where this will lead. Firms of insufficient political correctness — or insufficiently supportive of the President and his political cronies — can expect to get the Solomon treatment. Those that pay homage to the agenda of the ruling class, or pay cash to its campaigns, will almost certainly get a pass.

Oh punitive liberalism. Well, it's for the greater good after all.

Change!

Well now the Feds are telling companies which states are good and which states are ungood to build factories in. Boing is being forbidden from expanding production to a non-union shop in South Carolina.

Do I need to explain how many kinds of wrong this is? Not only is the federal government saying to Boeing that it gets to decide where it puts its production lines, it's telling South Carolina it may as well not enact laws designed to attract investment. All that's missing are the words "Five Year Plan."

Lovely.

Oh and don't worry about this either.

DISCLOSE died in Congress. It’s not the law of the land, nor should it be. So the president is considering just implementing it anyway by royal fiat. The effect of the order is straightforward: Give government contracting officers information about how a company and members of that company donate politically. These are companies that are competing for government contracts. The contracting officers will use that information — that’s the point of getting it, after all — in determining which companies will get the government contracts and which ones won’t.

What this is, is a license to reward companies the contracting officers and the administration that happens to be in power agree with, and punish others. It will be used to punish non-union companies and reward union companies, as the NLRB is already apparently doing.

Just swell.