Dan Greenfield describes the symbiotic relationship of three key manifestations of modernity.

Universalizing college has not universalized education; it has not made us a better educated country, only a dumber one. Universal education has led to dumbed-down education and meaningless degrees. The only way we could keep moving more and more students up the ladder was by making the ladder as short as possible. Promotion, populist education and educators who barely knew more than the students have taken care of the rest.

A college degree was once a mark of distinction, now it’s a checkmark even for jobs that don’t have any innate reason for requiring it, and fortunes have been spent by government and students just to “stay in place” with the jobs of yesterdays high school graduates going to tomorrow’s college grads.

The primary purpose of a degree in many fields is to provide demonstrable proof to prospective employers that you aren’t an idiot. A high school degree once served that purpose. Now not even a college degree does. But with a surplus of job-seekers, it’s a useful way to winnow down the stack of applications to people who can analyze the heteronormative subtext of a detergent commercial and have few options for employment because of their massive student loan debt.

Treating college as the new high school hasn’t benefited students who waste four years of their lives and pick up staggering debts which make it harder for them to buy homes and start families, but it has benefited the liberal arts infrastructure, which, despite the liberal spin, is just as good at handing out useless degrees with no career path as any for-profit college. And it has benefited the Democratic Party, which rightly sees college campuses as recruitment grounds and liberal-voter-training seminars. ...

Manhattan, home to Barnard, its sibling Columbia, NYU, Pace, and dozens of others, has one leading line of work, the restaurant business. The restaurant business doesn’t require a degree, just the willingness of pretty white people with student debt to wait tables at below minimum wage, and of some of the city’s three million illegal aliens to work illegally in the back. The city used to make things, now it makes sandwiches for Chinese tourists going to see a Disney musical on Broadway. Students dissatisfied with the low wages are, according to the erratically reliable New York Post, working at strip clubs. Fidel Castro boasted, that in Cuba, even the prostitutes have university degrees. Adopting the socialist degrees for everyone approach means we can now say the same thing.

Hat tip to Vanderleun.

Via Theo.

The narcissistic egotism of Barack Obama has provoked attention and comment since he emerged from the obscurity of Illinois politics to run for the presidency with essentially no record of any personal accomplishment beyond writing his own autobiography directly after graduating from Law School.

It is never easy to imagine Barack Obama topping some of his part exercises in superbia, like his “this was the moment when the rise of the oceans began to slow and our planet began to heal” nomination speech, but it seems that he recently, through the agency of his administration minions, had a jolly good try.

Seth Mandel, at Commentary, reports:

The Heritage Foundation’s Rory Cooper tweeted that Obama had casually dropped his own name into Ronald Reagan’s official biography on www.whitehouse.gov, claiming credit for taking up the mantle of Reagan’s tax reform advocacy with his “Buffett Rule” gimmick. My first thought was, he must be joking. But he wasn’t—it turns out Obama has added bullet points bragging about his own accomplishments to the biographical sketches of every single U.S. president since Calvin Coolidge (except, for some reason, Gerald Ford). Here are a few examples:

On Feb. 22, 1924 Calvin Coolidge became the first president to make a public radio address to the American people. President Coolidge later helped create the Federal Radio Commission, which has now evolved to become the Federal Communications Commission (FCC). [Emphasis added]President Obama became the first president to hold virtual gatherings and town halls using Twitter, Facebook, Google+, LinkedIn, etc.

In Chicago, this winter, a Peregrine falcon (Falco peregrinus) took a go at a Snowy owl (Bubo scandiacus). A local birder named Rick Remington got some great photos and described the action.

North American Birding:

[The owl] would do a somersault just as the Peregrine approached and flash its nasty talons in an attempt to scare off the Falcon. The battle lasted for 5 full minutes before the Falcon headed off in another direction and the Snowy Owl flew down to the rocks by the lake. It was a surprisingly violent and noisy encounter, with both birds shrieking loudly and the owl extending its giant wings to intimidate the smaller falcon. I fully expected this to end badly for the owl based on what I was watching. In spite of the obvious mismatch, the Snowy Owl managed to hold its own and escape unscathed.

This was clearly a territorial conflict rather than mere attempted predation. The duck hawk may have been the aggressor, but it was wise not to get close enough to get nabbed by the owl’s talons.

Hat tip to Karen L. Myers.

Brazilian commercial for Flying Horse energy drink.

Seeds Trust has this to say about it:

Seedsman Greg Schoen got the seed from Carl Barnes, a part-Cherokee man, now in his 80’s, in Oklahoma. He was Greg’s “corn-teacher”. Greg was in the process of moving last year and wanted someone else to store and protect some of his seeds. He left samples of several corn varieties, including glass gem. I grew out a small handful this past summer just to see. The rest, as they say is history. I got so excited, I posted a picture on Facebook. We have never seen anything like this. Unfortunately, we did not grow out enough to sell. Look for a small amount for sale starting in August 2011.

Seeds Trust was not, in fact, listing any Glass Gem corn seed for sale. They did have Golden Bantam, an old-time favorite variety which my father swore by. I grew some myself in our backyard one year as a kid. Golden Bantam takes forever to mature. Everybody else is eating fresh sweet corn and you have weeks and weeks and weeks yet to wait, but it really does taste better.

Geekologie has some more photos of Glass Gem.

Via Theo.

From Steve Bodio, a photo essay on hunting foxes with the Kazakh Tazy (or Tazi or тазы), the local version of the saluki or Persian greyhound, a hunting dog which pursues its quarry by sight.

The tazy is regarded as a Kazakh national symbol. This essay tells us that there was an old Kazakh saying that one tazy could feed an entire village. Tazy are described as capable of running down prey at speeds up to 80 kph (49.7 mph).

According to the Russian text, there are only 300 thoroughbred Kazakh tazy left: “300 Spartans.” I’m afraid that I don’t buy into that “only 300 left” stuff. Steve Bodio and I both own Kazakh tazy.

Our Uhlan looks a lot like those “thoroughbred Spartan Kazakh” dogs to me.

The L interview:

I’ve never worn sneakers or sweatshirts in my life. And I wore blue jeans—pretty much the same pair of blue jeans—every day, throughout college. And I decided the moment I graduated from college that I would never wear blue jeans again. And I have never worn blue jeans again.

Unlike Whit Stillman, I have worn sneakers and sweatshirts: exclusively while working out in health clubs, never on the street or at home. I think I was just very slightly older than him when I too came to the conclusion that there was no place in adult life for blue jeans and switched permanently to khaki slacks for informal wear.

From The Passive Voice via Karen L. Myers.

Winner of most un-PC product for the first half of 2012 has to be the sly marketer behind the now-vanished “Hiller Armament Company,” which ran off a batch of silhouette targets referencing the Trayvon Martin shooting controversy featuring a faceless figure wearing a hoodie and carrying Skittles and a can of ice tea.

Shooters like novelty targets featuring amusing contemporary news references, and they love black humor items like this one specifically calculated to offend the left. The targets sold out in two days, Hiller Armaments pocketed its money and went away laughing, and lefties generally had a cow.

Daily Kos’s reaction was classic.

The silhouette on the paper target is faceless. But the hoodie, the Skittles and the iced tea leave nothing to the imagination. This is meant to be Travyon Martin, the unarmed 17-year-old shot to death in February in Sanford, Florida. The unidentified internet merchant told Mike DeForest, a reporter for Orlando television station WKMG, that he sold out the silhouettes in two days. The targets come in packages of 10.

The twisted cretin who had these printed said: “My main motivation was to make money off the controversy.” Just business, man. Nothing personal.

Even Mark O’Mara, the attorney for George Zimmerman, the 28-year-old neighborhood watch volunteer who has been charged with second-degree murder in the shooting, found it disgusting:

“It’s this type of hatred—that’s what this is, it’s hate-mongering—that’s going to make it more difficult to try this case,” said O’Mara.

“I hope there is a crime that we can charge that person who made that with. I’m not sure what it is, but we need to come up with one.”

DeForest conducted an email exchange with the merchant who would not say how many of the targets he had sold, only that the response had been “overwhelming.” ...

It’s not hard to imagine what buyers of the Trayvon targets say to each other when they’re on the firing line. And when they say “fucking coons,” they don’t mumble.

Change.org is running a petition demanding that Hiller Armanents be prosecuted.

Matt Taibbi, a loudmouth hipster douchebag who writes for Rolling Stone, resembles the late Pauline Kael, who couldn’t understand how Richard Nixon could possibly have won the election, when she knew absolutely no one who voted for him. He sees Romney as completely boring and no threat to Obama whatsoever, but he at least puts it colorfully.

[T]his campaign, relatively speaking, will not be fierce or hotly contested. Instead it’ll be disappointing, embarrassing, and over very quickly, like a hand job in a Bangkok bathhouse.

When you come right down to it, isn’t life in general characteristically “disappointing, embarrassing, and over very quickly” for certain kinds of trendy scribblers?

(click on picture for larger image)
Top row from the left: Russian, Ukrainian, Tatar, Jew, Gypsy, Kyrgyzian.
Middle row from the left: Belorussian, Lithuanian, Georgian, Armenian, Kazakh, Uzbek.
Bottom row from the left: Latvian, Estonian, Azerbaijani, Moldovan, Tajik, Turkmenian

From Galina Sokolovska via Viktorija Ruškulienė.

From Roark Wolfe:

Dan Freedman has some data on the recent French election that most Americans had not realized.

This is from a friend in France:

Hello to my American friends,
As you know, the Socialist François Hollande won the presidential elections in France, last Sunday.
It is a catastrophe for France.
Hollande was elected by the Muslisms:
a survey (of 10,000 Muslims) shows that 93% of the Muslims voted for him.
As 2 million Muslims participated in this election, Hollande got 1,720,000 Muslim votes more than Sarkozy did: (0.93-0.07) x 2,000,000 = 1,720,000
But at the end, in the whole population, he got only 1,139,316 votes more than Sarkozy.
So, without the Muslims’ votes, Sarkozy would have been re-elected.
All the Muslim criminals feel now empowered.
Criminality is already on the rise (1,700 cars were burnt in France for the first night). Muslims are screaming anti-French and anti-Jews watchwords in our streets.
Veiled women, wearing the illegal burqa, are strolling in our streets.
And, as if this wasn’t enough, Hollande wants to give to all the foreigners the right to vote in our elections!!
France will face a very hard situation. We are heading for civil war in a few years.
That’s the last news from occupied France.

Maxime

What would Charles Martel think of this?

Hat tip to Advice Goddess.

Jim Geraghty (via email):

May 8, 2012: The Night the Primaries Became a Lot of Fun

In Wisconsin, Scott Walker received more votes running against no one in the Republican primary than the two major Democratic candidates got combined.

In North Carolina, “No Preference” garnered 21 percent in the Democratic Party presidential primary against Barack Obama.

In West Virginia, “A felon incarcerated in Texas took one in three votes away from President Obama in West Virginia’s Democratic presidential primary on Tuesday. Keith Judd, who is serving time in a federal prison in Texarkana, Texas, for extortion, took 37 percent of the vote, with 50 percent of precincts reporting. Obama captured the remaining 63 percent.”

The night could have gone worse for Democrats, but . . . I’m not sure how.

California is a kind of laboratory in which the bacilli of modernity germinate and grow at a preternatural pace, giving the rest of us a glimpse of our own dystopian future.

Norman Rogers takes a shot at describing life in the particularly lush Petri dish that is Northern California’s Marin County.

The population of Marin is overwhelmingly white, Democrat, and financially well-off. In 2008, nearly 80% of the vote went to Obama. The main minority consists of Spanish-speaking immigrants who prosper by providing services such as gardening, house-cleaning, and child care. The going rate for babysitting is close to $20 an hour. Although official statistics say that the Hispanics have low incomes, those statistics are based on the assumption that landscapers and babysitters, often in the country illegally, carefully report their earnings to the government. ...

Marin is a refuge for upper-income people. It is a place where they can escape the crime and congestion of San Francisco or Oakland. Above all, it is a place where their children can escape the generously funded but abysmal public schools of San Francisco and other urban cities.

In Marin there are shared values, and it is expected that the residents will toe the line. One of those shared values is a kind of make-believe tolerance. The reality is that the inhabitants of Marin are just as conformist and narrow-minded as are the inhabitants of flyover small towns ridiculed by Hollywood or Ivy-League sociology professors. Deviations from expectations will usually generate silent disapproval rather than verbal correction. However, if you depart too far from expectations, you may experience vigorous disapproval. ...

Charles Murray, in his new book Coming Apart, points out that a new social class has been created due to the greater economic value of brains, a consequence of the impact of new technology. These workers tend to be in the high-tech industry or the financial industry. They have a privileged position and are isolated from the rest of America. They tend to marry each other, and they cluster in certain places like Marin County. Because their skills are in great demand, they are unacquainted with economic hardship. The idea that, for example, environmental goals have to be compromised for economic goals is foreign to them because such difficult compromises are not something they have had to face in their personal lives. Since they have led such charmed lives, they see no reason why everyone can’t have similar advantages. So Obama’s message that he is going to fix everything resonates with them. Many members of this new class went to universities where doctrinaire and anti-capitalist ideology is rampant. Thus, they lack historical perspective, or even basic historical knowledge.

Smart people lacking a solid education are susceptible to crackpot ideas, be they global warming, the evil of plastic bags, radio waves making people sick, or Steve Jobs’ theory of healing cancer with nutrition.

Read the whole thing.

From Bookworm via Bird Dog.

Hat tip to Theo.

Atul Gawande shares a great story of the pre-anaesthesia age, in the New England Journal of Medicine.

The limits of patients’ tolerance for pain forced surgeons to choose slashing speed over precision. With either the flap method or the circular method, amputation could be accomplished in less than a minute, though the subsequent ligation of the severed blood vessels and suturing of the muscle and skin over the stump sometimes required 20 or 30 minutes when performed by less experienced surgeons. No matter how swiftly the amputation was performed, however, the suffering that patients experienced was terrible. ...

Before anesthesia, the sounds of patients thrashing and screaming filled operating rooms. So, from the first use of surgical anesthesia, observers were struck by the stillness and silence. In London, [Robert] Liston called ether anesthesia a “Yankee dodge” — having seen fads such as hypnotism come and go — but he tried it nonetheless, performing the first amputation with the use of anesthesia, in a 36-year-old butler with a septic knee, 2 months after the publication of Bigelow’s report. As the historian Richard Hollingham recounts, from the case records, a rubber tube was connected to a flask of ether gas, and the patient was told to breathe through it for 2 or 3 minutes. He became motionless and quiet. Throughout the procedure, he did not make a sound or even grimace. “When are you going to begin?” asked the patient a few moments later. He had felt nothing. “This Yankee dodge beats mesmerism hollow,” Liston exclaimed.

It would take a little while for surgeons to discover that the use of anesthesia allowed them time to be meticulous. Despite the advantages of anesthesia, Liston, like many other surgeons, proceeded in his usual lightning-quick and bloody way. Spectators in the operating-theater gallery would still get out their pocket watches to time him. The butler’s operation, for instance, took an astonishing 25 seconds from incision to wound closure. (Liston operated so fast that he once accidentally amputated an assistant’s fingers along with a patient’s leg, according to Hollingham. The patient and the assistant both died of sepsis, and a spectator reportedly died of shock, resulting in the only known procedure with a 300% mortality.

In his surgical exuberance, Liston apparently had cut through the coat tails of a distinguished visitor, who thought he’d been stabbed in the vitals and proceeded to die of fright.

The Telegraph informs us that art historians are proposing to employ facial recognition software developed for Counter-Terrorism to identify the unknown subjects in some well-known works of art.

Software developed to recognise terrorist faces is being adapted to solve the mystery of portraits of unidentified people. ...

A feasibility study is being conducted by two art historians and an electronic engineer at the University of California. They describe FACES (Faces, Art and Computerised Evaluation Systems) as a “new tool for art historians”. The project has received a $25,000 government grant.

Conrad Rudolph, professor of art history at the university, said: “Before the advent of photography, portraits were, almost by definition, depictions of people who were important in their own worlds. But, as a walk through almost any major museum will show, a large number of these unidentified portraits from before the 19th century have lost the identities of their subjects.”

From Lokwi via Fred Lapides.