Whiskey Fire

Those Who Can Teach, Teach; Therefore, Rich People Who Couldn't Be Bothered to Get Work as Teachers Should Be in Charge of Teaching. Because That Makes Sense!

The Wall Street Journal has discovered a hedge fund manager arse-a-brim with brilliant ideas about how We Can Fix Our Schools. It involves MOOCs, because this is dynamic out of the box thinking that disrupts paradigms and does other horseshit probably having to do with throughput and core competencies maximizing cross-silo creative, uh... spondees?

It begins as Our Hedge-Fund-Knight, Brave Sir Andy, ponders whan in the 21 Century we might goon pilgimages.

Anyone who cares about America's shortage of computer-science experts should cheer the recent news out of Georgia Tech. The Atlanta university is making major waves in business and higher education with its May 14 announcement that the college will offer the first online master's degree in computer science—and that the degree can be had for a quarter of the cost of a typical on-campus degree. Many other universities are experimenting with open online courses, or MOOCs, but Georgia Tech's move raises the bar significantly by offering full credit in a graduate program.

GTech has long been known for offering at least three options, but it is not at all clear how far this has gotten them.

At any rate a master's in computer science is kind of rarefied, especially at a place like GTech, which one supposes, has entrance requirements.

It comes just in time. A shortfall of computer-science graduates is a constant refrain in Silicon Valley, and by 2020 some one million high-tech job openings will remain unfilled, according to the Commerce Department.

Link as to proof of desperate lack of CS grads: not furnished. Bullshit suspected, though.

That's why Georgia Tech's online degree, powered by Udacity, is such a game-changer.

I miss "sea changes." The metaphor is just as dumb, but the sea is more inherently poetic.

For the same $7,000 a year that New York City spends per student on school buses, you can now get a master's from one of the most well-respected programs in the country. Moore's Law says these fees should drop to $1,000 by 2020—a boon for students and for the economy.

Well, this is fantastically stupid. Whatever New York City spends per child on buses, that's apples to hand grenades to what GTech charges for an online MS.

And "Moore's Law" is NOT REMOTELY ABOUT EDUCATIONAL COSTS. (Holy toboggans. If you need a citation here, drop dead, ignoramus.)

And it gets worse...

Sadly, MOOCs are not without controversy.

Ochone.

Consider what happened at San Jose State after the university last fall ran a test course in electrical engineering paid for by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. Students who worked with online content passed at a higher rate than classroom-only students, 91% to 60%. The course was so successful that the school's president decided to expand online courses, including humanities, which will also be rolled out to other California State universities.

Uh...

Electrical Engineering worked, so that's how you can successfully teach, uh, anything...?

You'd think professors would welcome these positive changes for students. Some teachers across the country are, however cautiously, embracing the MOOC model. But plenty of professors smell a threat to their livelihood. In an April 29 open letter to the university, San Jose State philosophy professors wrote: "Let's not kid ourselves; administrators at the CSU are beginning a process of replacing faculty with cheap online education."

Uh, no slight to Electical Engineers, but philosophy may be, well, different from that?

Is there any evidence at all that MOOCs can teach philosophy better than traditional instructors?

Well... not really.

But that's not even the issue. This is.

In April, an Amherst faculty committee decided against online courses, since they apparently run afoul of the school's mission of "learning through close colloquy." As it happens, Amherst professors rank seventh in salary of top liberal arts colleges, pulling in $137,700. And at Duke, where my son is a student, a faculty council at the school's arts and sciences college voted 16 to 14 against granting graduation credits for taking a Duke MOOC. By the way, Duke professors' average salary is $180,200.

So?

I have nothing against teachers—or even high salaries, if the teachers are worth it. But half of recent college graduates don't have jobs or don't use their degree in the jobs they find. Since 1990, the cost of college has increased at four times the rate of inflation. Student loans are clocking in at $1 trillion.

Shazam.

In an all-MOOC world, are we really going to see an explosion in people adding to their resumes "I went to Amherst and Duke by signing up for a free class with hundreds of other thousands of random people on the Internet"?

Well, we might. If so, I'd advise investing in online resume-deletion software.

Think about it: Today's job market—whether you're designing new drugs, fracking for oil, writing mobile apps or marketing Pop Chips—requires graduates who can think strategically in real time, have strong cognitive skills, see patterns, work in groups and know their way around highly visual virtual environments. This is the same generation that grew up playing online games like Call of Duty and World of Warcraft, but who are almost never asked to use their online skills in any classroom.

Gosh. Previous generations only had to contend with Bowzer. And also we had to know algebra and subject-verb agreement. We could not for the life of us "think strategically in real time," as the Internet was insufficiently advanced for that class of bang-bang.

What I'm getting at is that the country HAS MOOCs, in a far superior, successfully proven form.

They are called "community colleges." They are cheap, accessible, rigorous, and they, we, have a historical record of working very well.

But what we do very well is accelerate social mobility.

THAT is something that cannot stand....

An Beal Bocht

We are broke! Slash spending! Spending bad! Deficits bad!

It's always worth noting that this General Rule has its exceptions, such as War; whenever military action is contemplated, questions about whether or not it Can Be Afforded are suddenly Un-American.

But there are other areas in which nobody ever seems to wonder about what it costs.

Prisons, for one thing.

D1 coaches in the big 2 sports, for another.

Our nation is not poor. It is unimaginably wealthy.

When the money is desired, it flows, and no one cares whether or not it's wasted.

Straight-up "Fuck You"

You don't often see this, so it's worth flagging -- a genuine, consistent asshole.

The Congressional Budget Office released updated projections today to find that the federal budged deficit is smaller than at this point last year, and smaller than at any time since the 2008 financial crisis. There are three main reasons for that: the slowly-improving economy is putting more people back to work, which means fewer safety net payments and more tax revenue; defense spending cuts; and the tax hikes from January 1 2013 have gone into effect.

Conclusion?

Much of this is to be expected - as the economy recovers, there will naturally be an increase in tax revenue and a drop in social safety net spending. At least part of this, however, is due to President Obama's ideal version of a "grand bargain" on tax hikes and spending cuts - mostly tax hikes on upper income-earners and spending cuts that fall heavily on the military. It also is not a sign that President Obama is some kind of deficit hawk. He's just a textbook Keynesian.

Well, more a Cliff's Notes Keynesian, though given the dismal bog that is our anti-science Congress, whatever.

Maybe if we had real Keynesianism we'd have had actual economic growth and Amercans would have better lives!

But nah, Keynes was a fag...

Our Public Discourse is Swell.

 

When You Add up the Numbers

The arguments in favor of Austerity Forever are difficult to challenge, in the sense that clouds have difficulty rebutting the wisdom directed at them by shouty old men. Here for instance is Rick Moran, one of the Finest Minds of the Online Right, responding to this.

Does cutting the budget cause a slowdown in growth? As we all know, Washington isn’t “cutting” anything, but rather reducing the rate of growth in government programs. In the sense that the “normal” growth in spending for a government program is cut back slightly, it may affect certain procurement programs like weapons purchases. This would indeed be a loss of economic activity and thus put a damper on the economy.

Gosh. So cutting spending in a recession is bad?

Here though is the load of which you you should get.

Regardless of any justification for cutting spending by scholarly papers, the need to cut the budget and cut it now is a necessity. What Krugman and other “stimulus” advocates never mention is the politics of budget cutting, which is not concerned with the numbers of deficit reduction as much as it is with the art of the possible in negotiating a fix for our short and long term deficit problems.

Does anyone seriously believe if we get back to robust growth in the economy — 4% or more — that the political will to deal with our long term debt problems, our entitlement problems, and further deficit reduction will exist? It isn’t so much that the deficit and debt are “immediate” crisis in the sense that unless we balance the budget by next year, the economy will collapse. But once the economy improves, and revenue begins to recover, the need for deficit reduction disappears and Congress will go back to business as usual.

That’s the political reality. Without a spur to their behinds, Congress won’t deal with our debt and deficit problems. And that spur — uncontrolled deficits and a continual increase in our national debt — will disappear once the good times are rolling again.

See, we can't have robust economic growth spurred by increased government spending, because if we had that, it would solve the deficit problem, and that would completely destroy the political will to enact the government spending cuts we would need to enact to solve the deficit problem that would have been already solved by the robust economic growth spurred by increased government spending.

Rick Moran's gift for not understanding anything, and thus inadvertently clarifying the deep idiocy of his own side's propaganda, is glorious to behold. All hail the Ignoramus Savant.

Burning Flag Birthday Suit

I've never much hidden my overall dislike of the US constitution.

As a general rule, large groups of upper class Englishmen are incapable of producing anything except a bunch of crap you can never clean up properly, and the Founding Fathers were nothing if not upper class Englishmen, and hence, hateful twerps.

That an allegedly free people cannot stop unironically using puerile, self-abasing terms like "the Founding Fathers" speaks to our to our perdurable national mania for tongue-bathing obvious moral degenerates as long as they have some type of "patriotic" pedigree. That an allegedly free people cannot put a stake through the rotten heart of such vampiric malignancies as the Electoral College, the Senate, and (shudder) New Jersey speaks to the undeniably ossifying effect of our continued braindead, onanistic adoration of a shoddy, slapdash, cloddishly compromise document written by a gang of wig-wearing, fractious, syphilitic, slaveowning dickheads.

So much is clear, uncontroversial, and refreshingly devoid of hyperbole.

Hence I found this op-ed in the NYT more than a little surprising, yet quite welcome.

AS the nation teeters at the edge of fiscal chaos, observers are reaching the conclusion that the American system of government is broken. But almost no one blames the culprit: our insistence on obedience to the Constitution, with all its archaic, idiosyncratic and downright evil provisions.

Shit yes!

To quibble, "evil" is useless as an analytical criterion, so I'd pinch-hit "undemocratic" for "downright evil." But the rest is unexceptionable.

Not kidding here, either. There is an intense censorship effect in Our Free Society against the idea that it is at all fair game to, of all things, think critically about the US constitution. This to me is the most interesting part of Seidman's piece:

Our obsession with the Constitution has saddled us with a dysfunctional political system, kept us from debating the merits of divisive issues and inflamed our public discourse. Instead of arguing about what is to be done, we argue about what James Madison might have wanted done 225 years ago.

As someone who has taught constitutional law for almost 40 years, I am ashamed it took me so long to see how bizarre all this is.

Bold mine.

You're just not supposed to think of the constitution as something certain people thought of and put into practice in specific historical circumstances. Even though that is all that it is. It is not Holy Writ, and to think of it as such is one of the following: childish, wicked, or dickish.

Childish.

I like liberty and the Constitution is its bulwark.

Wicked.

And if the Constitution is this obsolete and “evil,” then maybe secession isn’t off the table after all? . . . .

Dickish.

I big strong go boom-boom. (Paraphrasing)

Because democracy demands that if you wonder why Wyoming has the exact same Senate representation as a state where people live voluntarily, you've just peed on Jefferson's grave.

I would cheerfully pee on Jefferson's grave. And on Wyoming.

MAS. PowerTools provides the definitive case for why you can't entrust the defense of a stupid church to its halfwit clergy.

But the Founders built well, knowing that the Constitution—the documentary embodiment of the Rule of Law replacing the Rule of Man (or Rule of the King, as practical matters had it in the 1780s)—would work only if it became an object of reverence in place of a monarch among the people.

As a matter of history, this is fanciful garbage. As a matter of exemplifying modern "conservatism" as nothing more, or less, than dickless, vaginaless, mindless, conformist idolatry... well done, PowerLine!

I mean...

Hence most constitutional law professors treat the Constitution as a plaything from which to extract whatever outcome they want.

Because, you'll never catch out a "conservative" jurist ever doing anything of the sort.

These fuckers, they snort what they sell, and then they tell you, like butter wouldn't melt, that their powdery nostrils and red-rimmed crazy eyes simply prove that they so very dearly love the Jelly Doughnuts of Freedom.

 

 

Michelle Malkin's Fashion Report

Well-dressed & entirely rational, not in the least bit absurdly paranoid conservative cheerleader Michelle Malkin has the scoop: It's a fashionista conspiracy!

Talk about wearing your politics on your sleeve. An elitist clique of fashion designers has banded together to raise money for celebrity-in-chief Barack Obama and browbeat their customers into supporting him. Even worse, the Beautiful People who dress the Powerful People are putting increased pressure on conservatives to stay out of the business altogether. Out: Haute couture. In: Hate couture.

Much too lazy to do a 180° treatment of that paragraph (Substituting "armament industry" for fashion designers, Romney for Obama, lib for con, yada.) but certainly you can imagine. You can also imagine the incredible "pressure" being applied:

Diane von Furstenberg pitched in two $85 tote bags and has grown more strident about her partisan agenda as Election Day nears. At a fashion event in her New York Meatpacking District store last month, she yelled at clients: "Everyone here better be a Democrat; no Republicans!"

Wow. Not sure pressure is a strong enough word. Fortunately Malkin found someone (Pro-Romney because he doesn't like to pay taxes or a living wage to women indentured in his sweatshops? Who knows?) to reveal that it's not mere pressure but a threat! And to do a 180 that reveals where the true attacks on women come from.

Young New York City designer Bradley Scott also spoke up against ideological "persecution" in his industry. "It's really offensive for me, as a designer, to be issued an unveiled threat by someone who could exert an enormous amount of influence over my customers, store buyers and magazine editors," he told me on Tuesday. "I for one want absolutely nothing to do with this attack on women. This pressure upon designers should offend every woman in this country, not just the conservatives."

As far as I can determine the real conspiracy here was making Ann Romney appear as if she's a blind woman who lets a six-yr. old Disney Princess fan choose her clothes.

Richard Perry/The New York Times Mitt Romney and his wife, Ann, left, made cherry pies with Linda Hundt, the owner of Sweetie-licious Bakery Cafe in DeWitt, Mich., during a campaign stop in June.

See how far up Mitt Romney's ass the stick goes at the photo source.

— M. "Types In His Underwear" Bouffant

Everyone At The Corner Is Being Kind Of A Butt-Hurt Dick, But...

John Fund really takes the cake:

Moderators Should Not Be ‘Fact-Checkers’

OH!

Heaven FOR-FUCKING-FEND a moderator in a debate over who should be the leader of the free fucking world should be armed with a perfunctory grasp on reality, which she could then use against whichever one of the candidates who happens to be lying his grinny mouth off. I mean, can you imagine?! If that happened, it would almost be like the word "journalism" actually meant something, and if it did, well, the National Review would find itself sans staff.

Romney's Hands Must Not Be Clean, Nor His Heart Pure

New slogan for the Mitt Movement. Yes, it's bullshit from a moron. Here Mitt indicates his love for "sport:"But why wouldn't they use the original? Oh.

New American Standard Bible (©1995) He who has clean hands and a pure heart, Who has not lifted up his soul to falsehood And has not sworn deceitfully.

Here, a Mormon uses the original verse from the Psalm while detailing his porno addiction. (I wonder if that all began at a Marriott.)

Righteousness:As to whiny complaints about being accused of talking through one's magic Mormon hat, "who the cap fits, he must wear it."— M. "Zen Rasta" Bouffant

Tithe Goes In, Tithe Goes Out. You Can't Explain That!

by Ripley

“And, once again, tithing is ten percent off the top. That’s gross income, not net. Please, people, don’t force us to audit.”

From BuzzFeed's Andrew K., on the Comunication Platform That Shall Not Be Named:

Interesting strategy. RT @markknoller: Romney says he's not releasing more tax returns so as to keep his tithes to Mormon Church private.

Unlike all of you people, I trust our very serious media personalities and journalists to accept this newest development in Camp Romney with the obsequiousness it deserves, and not go around "wondering" and "asking questions" and what have you. In case you hadn't noticed, Barack Obama has thus far refused - refused! - to answer or atone for the color of his skin, his political views or his skulking about the White House. 

Let's allow the American Media to do the job we hired them to do, OK?

See you in church!

 

Rip - 

P(r)ick Of The Wk.

Who else?

Mr. Ryan

Politico has an interesting background piece on Rep. Paul Ryan (R-WI) which includes an anecdote showing his "keen sense of how his status had changed once he won his first election to the House in 1998."

A reporter he knew from his days as a congressional aide approached him to wish him well.

"Congratulations, Paul," said the reporter, who was several years older than Ryan.

"It's Mr. Ryan, now," he replied.

No surprise. Is there anything else any one needs to know about this colossal jerk?

— M. Bouffant (Also.)