You know your city has become a hellhole when…
Category Archives: Social Commentary
The End Of Servants
The world has changed.
I know that if I were rich, I wouldn’t want them. I hate being waited on and like to do things for myself. It’s one of the reasons I don’t really enjoy dining out — I merely tolerate it.
There Will Be A Test Later
Lessons in achieving consensus.
I like the twinkles.
Yowza
Charlie Martin suddenly feels better about Huntsman. I can see why.
Skills That Recent IT Grads Are Lacking
Seven of them. It’s probably a problem with technical degrees in general, not just IT.
Should Liberals Be Skeptical?
…it is just not the protesters’ apparent allergy to capitalism and suspicion of normal democratic politics that should raise concerns. It is also their temperament. The protests have made a big deal of the fact that they arrive at their decisions through a deliberative process. But all their talk of “general assemblies” and “communiqués” and “consensus” has an air of group-think about it that is, or should be, troubling to liberals. “We speak as one,” Occupy Wall Street stated in its first communiqué, from September 19. “All of our decisions, from our choices to march on Wall Street to our decision to camp at One Liberty Plaza were decided through a consensus process by the group, for the group.” The air of group-think is only heightened by a technique called the “human microphone” that has become something of a signature for the protesters. When someone speaks, he or she pauses every few words and the crowd repeats what the person has just said in unison. The idea was apparently logistical—to project speeches across a wide area—but the effect when captured on video is genuinely creepy.
True liberals certainly should be. But most people who call themselves that these days aren’t. And of course, it’s hard to take very seriously anyone who thinks that Dodd-Frank is “the best liberal hope for improving democratically regulated capitalism.”
[Update a while later]
The Wall Street protesters have been sold a bill of goods:
The narrative that came out of these events—largely propagated by government officials and accepted by a credulous media—was that the private sector’s greed and risk-taking caused the financial crisis and the government’s policies were not responsible. This narrative stimulated the punitive Dodd-Frank Act—fittingly named after Congress’s two key supporters of the government’s destructive housing policies. It also gave us the occupiers of Wall Street.
We have to take back the narrative.
NASA’s Insane Risk Aversion
My latest rant on the ISS situation, over at Open Market.
Now We Have To Worry About The Northern Border, Too
Reasons to fear Canada.
As if we needed more.
Why Do Women Have B00Bs?
Asking the important questions. It remains an evolutionary mystery. Maybe Glenn (and Ben) have the right answer, but it’s unsatisfactory from a scientific standpoint.
Child Of The Corn
This guy needs to turn in his man card:
A man used his cellphone to call from Connors Farm in Danvers at about 7 p.m. Tuesday after he, his wife and two children became lost in the maze, police said.
You’d think his wife would have asked for directions.