– Dwight Pelz’ letter supporting marriage equality in Washington State.
– I know Stamper is talking about nationally, but the police response to Occupy Seattle has been much better than to WTO.
– Although, obviously, still a lot of room for improvement. Lots of room.
– On top of the bike getting you to the story first, bike gloves are the best for typing in Seattle’s cold.
– Keep the birth control requirement in the health care law.
re the ribald moth story:
“NO NO NO NO NO NO NO!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! THAT’S NOT RRRRRRRRIBALDRY!!!!! THAT’S PORNOGRAPHY!!!!!!!!!!!!
RRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRIBALDY!” (index finger pointed in the air and twirling for emphasis)
It seems that there is still a major disconnect between the financial titans and the “Occupy” protesters. They simply don’t understand what the fuss is about, they think they should be admired and rewarded for their successful accumulation of wealth, half of the 1% don’t even think they are part of the 1%, they think all the problems are caused by too much regulation, and they think they already pay too much in taxes.
Captains of Finance Don’t Understand
I guess when you have a home in the Hamptons and commute to work by helicopter, with other homes in other locations (L.A., Palm Beach, Montana, the Carribean, Italy, etc.), and you are still considered “poor” by old-money standards, it’s hard to understand the problems of a 25-year old who graduated college in 2008 and is still trying to get a job, with 100K in school debt.
Remember that Rush Limbaugh gets paid about a million dollars a day to sit on his rear end and tell lies about the occupiers.
I think they got a bad deal. For $100, they could have picked up someone off the street, have them tell them how good they are in bed and how rotten their critics are, and gotten sexual services to boot.
Speaking of the #Occupy Movement, here’s some video for the extravaganza later tonight.
Occupy Wall Street 99% Spotlight Signal
http://www.youtube.com/watch?f.....xG4g62rnd8
You know that “management fee” of somewhere about 1% (+/- .03%) on your mutual fund plan? That’s the fee paid to the mutual fund administrators to “handle” your money. Each and every year they charge that fee against your TOTAL fund balance.
So even if they don’t make any changes or trades, and you don’t make any contributions or withdrawals from the plan, they still charge you about 1%. Even if they blow it and make bad trades, or get stuck in a poor position for lack of planning or attention, you still pay them the 1%.
Put this in perspective – if you’ve accumulated 100K in your 401(K) plan by saving 10% of your salary over a decade or more, plus employer matching, they will take $1,000 of that amount. The only product you will see is the quarterly report they send you telling you how much money you made or lost over that period – and they will try very hard to get you to agree to get it online, so they can save the money on printing and postage. But even if the save the money, it won’t change the 1% administrative fee.
Now the SEC is investigating these fees, and finding that some firms have engaged in fraudulent transactions to justify the fees. In one case being pursued by the SEC, the mutual fund hired an “outside” firm for millions of dollars worth of consulting services (advice), yet received virtually nothing in services. It shouldn’t surprise you to learn that the heads of the mutual fund firms were the stockholders of the “outside” consulting firm. The SEC believes this is just the tip of the iceberg.
And the financial titans are complaing that it is just the type of regulatory oversight that the SEC is using for this investigation which is hampering “job growth”, and they argue that it needs to be repealed.
# 4: Does that come with a “batman” spotlight signal?
By the way, there WTO experience showed us a few things.
Police and local activists initially relied upon the “Seattle approach” to the protests. Based on years of experience in Seattle, protesters and police expected to share information on their plans, protesters would give police information in advance of who wanted to be arrested and how they would arrange to be arrested in a non-violent fashion of protest, and the police would respond in a tolerent manner.
But it quickly broke down as it became apparant that there were quite a few out-of-towners appearing at the protests who had no intention of playing by those rules. Add in a few anarchists, mostly from Oregon, and things got out of hand by the first night.
That’s when the police over-reacted. Realizing they were badly outnumbered in terms of the total crowd size, they asked the local unions to cancel their planned march (they consented), and then put out an “all agency” call for support.
This means you had sherriff’s deputies from the surrounding areas, suburban police, etc., being added to the mix. Coordination with those units was poor. And a lot of those deputies from the more rural areas were more than eager to mix it up with both the protesters and the media, and were blamed with more illegal pepper-spraying incidents than would be justified by their numbers.
Of course, Norm has now gone on to other avenues. He was blamed here for having too lax a response, and then having to over-compensate.
But the key lesson here is probably that every protest is different, and requires a different police response. And an entire protest shouldn’t receive the same response as might be warranted against a handful of what may be provacutours.
Occupy Sammamish? Whats next?…Occupy the local Safeways frozen food section? OWS jumped the shark long ago.
There has been a Police response to Occupy Seattle?
Why would the Police respond? Any response just comes with an automatic apology from Mayor McNoBalls.
@8–Funny!
How about “occupy the expensive shitters in downtown Seattle”?? Pack ’em tight with the unwashed, stinking heathen hippies. That will certainly make an appropriate statement about their “movement”. It’s a “Bowel” Movement.
@1 You call that pornography? Times have changed. It bears a close resemblance to mainstream advertising for children’s school apparel.
GOPers: Shut ‘Er Down!!!
Majorities of Republicans in both houses of Congress voted today to shut down the federal government.
http://nbcpolitics.msnbc.msn.c.....-gop-split
Roger Rabbit Commentary: Why would anyone ever vote Republican?
This article debunks the rightwing mythology that poor people don’t pay taxes.
http://www.dailyfinance.com/20.....de-debate/
I understand the Occupy movement. The students who rallied to help the President get elected are frustrated that on Wall Street, things are just as bad as they have ever been.
But, of course, they aren’t going to get any better with Republicans in charge, who claim that the Wall Street titans are the “job creators” who are over-burdened by regulations.
I’m not sure that the “Occupy” movement’s insistence on lack of leadership and no clearly defined demands or goals is working for them any longer. As an encampment, it’s going to have a hard time lasting through the winter. And once it breaks up, it’s going to be hard to focus those energies in a fashion which is likely to have a positive impact.
I think they should change course and enact some clear demands. They should adopt an organizational structure which allows them to press those demands on multiple fronts – lobbying Congress, playing to the media, and making their numbers known. They should declare a set date to end the “occupy” camps and instead rely on frequent marches and one-day demonstrations to keep the media spotlight.
The occupiers are somewhat resistent to it because they don’t want to be co-opted by the Democratic establishment, which they see as part of the problem. They want a fundamental change in who controls Congress, taking money out of the equation. But without a political solution, they will always be on the outside, looking in.
Ironically, the earliest aspects of the Tea Party had similar frustrations over the Bush bailouts of the finance industry under TARP I. But they were quickly co-opted, and then organized and funded, by the Republicans to re-direct that anger at the Democrats. What the Occupiers need to do is become the anti-Tea Party in terms of policy and impact, but still maintain some independence so they can “primary out” those Democrats who don’t get the message.
GOP targeting tax breaks Plan would limit popular middle class deductions.
So where’s the shared sacrifice?
http://www.washingtonpost.com/.....story.html
14 – From that article:
The top 1 percent get 17 percent of all income in this country, twice what they got 30 years ago. They did well, the rest went hardly anywhere..
If we don’t want to cut defense or touch Social Security or Medicare all that much, where’s the money going to come from???
@16 GOPers’ idea of shared sacrifice is kidnapping your kids, holding them for ransom, then making you pay their income taxes on the ransom money.
@16 GOPers’ idea of shared sacrifice is kidnapping your kids, holding them for ransom, then demanding you pay their income taxes on the ransom money.
Wall Street is scared of the Occupiers.
“‘All of these things are intertwined,’ Dennis Gartman, the hedge fund manager and author of The Gartman Letter, wrote this morning. ‘Tear gas on the streets of Athens; students being arrested in the streets of NY … these are symptoms of economic sickness ….
“For Gartman, there are four things making the market too gut-wrenching for many investors: 1) Rioting in Greece against forced austerity measures; 2) worries that the Occupy Wall Street movement could swell into a larger market protest; 3) the collapse of MF Global, which went bankrupt after bets on European debt went sour; and 4) revelations that the European debt contagion could be moving to the steadier economies of France, Belgium and elsewhere.
“Of particular concern is the OWS movement, which continues to garner widespread media coverage even as its members are getting evicted from their encampments in New York and elsewhere and the numbers appear to be dropping.
“‘The concerns about the banking system; the concerns about the supposed “unfairness” of the tax system; concerns about Wall Street’s power have all coalesced in this motley, ill-tempered, un-sophisticated movement,’ Gartman wrote, ‘that at the moment has very little in the way of concrete philosophy to guide it but which nonetheless seems to have engendered wider support than we had ever thought possible.'”
http://www.cnbc.com/id/45356877
Roger Rabbit Commentary: If you’ve been worrying that OWS isn’t having an impact, worry no more; when market pundits begin blaming the dropping stock market on protesters, you know for sure the protests are getting under the one-percenters’ skin in a big way.
Wireless company Clearwire appears on the verge of bankruptcy.
http://www.cnbc.com/id/45358521
@2 Reminds me of a story about a billionaire who applied for a board vacancy at a prestigious New York City eleemosynary institution. In keeping with the “Old Money” habit of understating wealth, he listed only $100 million of his holdings on his resume. He got back a form letter thanking him for applying and advising him they would keep his application “on file.”
I just made the mistake of turning on the radio while it was turned to Dori Monson’s station during his time slot.
In the thirty seconds I mistakenly had the radio turned to that station, I heard Dori call the Occupy Seattle protesters “rats scurrying from one place to another”.
Let’s take a moment to remember just a few of Dori’s career highlights:
In 2005 or so he was ranting that we didn’t need the federal government involved in housing, because anybody who wanted a house could get one. As an example he held up a Russian immigrant who had bought three homes within five years of arriving in the U.S. If I remember correctly, he said that only the “lazy or stupid” can’t buy a home in the Seattle area.
But only three years later, in 2008, he was ranting that the housing and banking collapse was caused by the irresponsible borrowers who bought homes by taking out mortgages which were clearly beyond their means. He admitted to absolutely no responsibility for his own contribution to that crisis.
Then two years ago, in the late November monday-night snowstorm which created huge traffic jams throughout the Seattle area, he was on broadcasting the local Monday night football game at Qwest Field. Leaving a business dinner in Bellevue, I tuned to the station to catch the last few minutes of the game.
As the game ended, Dori spent the next two hours talking about every subject under the sun, with occassional references to “some bad weather out there, everyone be careful driving”, without saying anything more helpful. In the meantime people got in their cars and mistakenly tried to listen to post-game coverage until they found themselves in hopeless gridlock called by snow, ice, spin-outs, and congestion. If they knew the true nature of the conditions, many of them would have driven to relatives or friends houses closer nearby, or rented hotel rooms.
I came to a stop just AFTER having passed the Totem Lake exit, and then spent the next ten hours waiting to get home. Only after turning to 1000 AM did I get decent coverage of the storm, which occured because the DJ had the good sense to have people call in by cell phone and report the conditions where they were.
Dori Monson just likes to hear himself talk, and seems very impressed with what he hears.
@3 It’s not that much. Rush makes about $1 million a week — his current contract is $54 million a year.
“rats scurrying from one place to another”.
Sounds about right.
@5 “You know that ‘management fee’ of somewhere about 1% (+/- .03%) on your mutual fund plan? That’s the fee paid to the mutual fund administrators to ‘handle’ your money. Each and every year they charge that fee against your TOTAL fund balance.”
These guys aren’t against taxing your wealth as long as they get to pocket it. But let someone else suggest a government tax on wealth and HOO BOY —
“SOCIALISM!!!”
“REDISTRIBUTION!!!”
“IT’LL DESTROY AMERICA!!!”
@8 – 11: Same Montana goatfucker, 4 different screen names.
@23 I wonder if the Russian immigrant is still paying his mortgages on all three homes?
In Japan, the very best graduates are given a job in the government and it’s regulatory agencies. Others go into private industry. The two career paths never cross, people don’t go from private industry into government, or vice-versa. That would be considered a serious conflict of interest.
The government regulators command the respect from the industry. They know that they can be shut down in short order if the agency thinks they are doing something wrong. When the governmental officials appear, there is an awful lot of bowing going on – with CEO’s bowing almost down to the knees (how low you bow is a reflection of the status of the “bower” and the “bowee”.)
I’m thinking that’s what we need in the financial industry here in the U.S., to “clean house”. Get rid of the insiders from being head of the SEC, the Treasury, and the Fed. Make sure they understand that the era of the “Robber Barons” is over.
@29 Saw on CNBC today that Newt Gingrich got paid $1.8 million by Freddie Mac to make that agency look “more Republican” to the public by renting them his name.
See? It’s easy to make it big in America! All you have to do is become a corrupt politician and then whore yourself to greedy corporations.
@25 People are “rats” because they object to being fucked over by greedheads? Sounds very wingnut.
30 – Gingrich got 37 million since 2003 from health care interests for his health care stink tank.
http://www.azcentral.com/news/.....firms.html
People should be fully awake to this scumbag by now.
They aren’t a out there because they “object to being fucked over by greedheads?” they are out there because they are bratty, weed-inebriated, aimless, greedy little shits.
See there you go again, first they’re hippies, then they’re hipsters, then they’re hippies again. Make up your friggin’ mind.
MF finical when tits up after breaking the law and engaging in very stupid behavior. If you’re skittish on the market because the market and the rule of law are functioning properly (firms that do stupid and illegal things should go belly up), there’s not much I, or anyone else can do, to help you. Matter of fact, why don’t those people who are skittish do to a properly functioning society do the rest of us a favor and put a gun to their temple and blow their brains out.
Hey rich guy, pay your fucking bills like the rest of us. Like those college kids that got sold very expensive, useless, degrees that can’t even get rid of that debit though bankruptcy.
On a side note, what’s the point of bankruptcy if you can’t discharge your debits?
“..those college kids that got sold very expensive, useless, degrees…”
That’s why it’s important to choose wisely a course of study when one borrows money for an education. Anyone who borrows $100,000 to get a four-year degree in art appreciation is kidding himself or herself as to the employment possibilities from such a degree. Better to major in accounting and take all the art appreciation classes as free electives only.
@37
A lot of those kids got sold a false bill of goods. They got totally hosed, while their profs and other college employees got cushy, well paid, jobs with good retirement on the backs of the kids they swindled. There should be some sort of debit forgiveness.
Oh dear… What a soul-killing occupation..
Just look at the Montana “friendo”..
Much better “practical” career paths: medicine, engineering, scientific research..
# 37: It’s a rare kid with a degree in “art appreciation” these days, much less one complaining about not being able to get a job. Most of those with those types of degrees get them with the secure knowledge that their mommy or daddy with their position on the board of the museum can make sure they are hired.
Ironically, the ones having the most difficult time are those who attended private post-high-school technical schools seeking a two-year degree in electronics, etc. Their tuition is the same as a high-priced private college. But common sense would seem to indicate that they shouldn’t have trouble getting a job, right? Wrong. Employers often skip right over those people, prefering to either hire employees with on-the-job experience, or hire someone with no experience and train them themselves.
And, of course, it doesn’t help that much of the electronic work is being outsourced overseas now. And often students start a course of study in a field which is high demand when the begin college, only to find that there is little demand when they graduate. Sometimes this is due to cyclical industries, sometimes it is due to the economy generally, but more often now it is because of decisions made in exective offices to out-source the work overseas in order to take advantage of tax breaks and starvation wages overseas.
re 37: ‘Better to major in accounting and take all the art appreciation classes as free electives only.’
Bullshit.
Anyone who actually finishes an accredited college with a bona-fide degree in anything will, over the long haul, make a lot more money than someone with no degree. You don’t know what you are talking about — Yer spouting the ‘common wisdom’ — which is just that — common.
What they are really worried about on Wall Street is that this spontaneous movement has been silently infiltrated by professional organizers who have experience in the Arab Spring and other uprisings.
Hold on to your seat! This is going to be a long and wild ride. With Wall Street the way it is, I’m assuming that you already know to hang on to your wallet.
Kids graduating today with 20K in debit who are being taught by teachers that are making more money than college profs have ever made, profs who in a lot of cases went to school for nearly free, are still getting hosed.
Really the difference is skilled labor V. unskilled or semi-skilled labor, not do you have a degree or not (more people with degrees do skilled labor). You can live just fine off of the earnings from a two year RN or cardiovascular tech degree.
That’s really what both #37 and I are saying, you need a marketable skill to go with that BA degree and currently just getting a BA in something doesn’t guarantee that have a marketable skill.
I’m not arguing against a BA and I don’t think #37 is either.
Cornell West is throwing down, brother.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?f.....Gdq7Jmyt3g
re 42: You have to go to war with the army that you have. No one’s had it easy if you are one of the 99%. If you have a system that’s rigged to hose you, you have to take their money and hose them back.
@37 It’s okay to spend $100,000 on a degree in art appreciation if (a) your daddy is rich, and/or (b) you’re a good-looking female with great dating prospects. After all, if some banker makes millions by screwing the proletariat, doesn’t he want an attractive wife who knows how to give all that money away?
@42 Two thoughts here. First, I know a couple of retired guys who belonged to unions and made their living in the trades; they live as well s I do, and have better pensions and health plans than I do, as a retired state lawyer. You don’t have to go to college to make a decent living; because of the you-must-go-to-college propaganda, apprenticeships go begging, and if you’re real big on book learning and like working with your hands, you may be a lot happier in a trade than a cubicle (which is the destination of most of today’s college graduates).
Second, love of learning is a magnificent thing, and you don’t have to go to college to love learning, and if you couldn’t go to college you can still get a superb education through self-learning. A case in point (which also reinforces my first point above):
When I was in law school, and could only afford unreliable cars, I got stuck a few miles outside of Chelan with a thrown rod. A local farmer happened along, went and got his tractor, and towed me to his spread. He was in his mid-50s and made his living by working construction jobs (mostly highway and road building) when there was work, and hobby farming (and a bit of animal husbandry) when there wasn’t work. He had a beautiful spread on top of a bluff overlooking the Columbia River with a view to die for. His “house” was a shack constructed of 2x4s and flattened cardboard boxes. He slept in a bed outside, summer and winter, and the commode was set in a niche in the cliff (it was plumbed and actually flushed!), because there was no room for living quarters in the “house.” Why? Because the entire interior of the cardboard shack was occupied by row upon row of bookshelves. There must have been 20,000 books in there. He told me he bought most of them at flea markets for next to nothing. This guy could talk about anything, and had so much knowledge he’d run a lot of college profs into the ground! I’d vote for this guy for president in a heartbeat, but that was 40 years ago, and I’m sure he’s dead by now — if he isn’t, he’s pushing 100 years of age and surely is in a nursing home.
I have absolutely no doubt this guy had an IQ in the 150s or 160s. I say that because he was quicker and smarter than me, and my IQ is in the neighborhood of 145 to 150, so he had to be higher than that. He also had to be a speed reader with tremendous comprehension to go through 20,000 books in one lifetime, and after talking with him for 45 minutes, there wasn’t a shadow of a doubt in my mind that he had read them all and remembered the contents. This guy probably could have gotten a scholarship to any university in the country, including the top-tier ones, but he chose to be a road builder instead and sleep outdoors on top of a cliff with 20,000 books to keep him company.
It surprised me at the time, but not anymore, because I’ve learned a few things about life in general since then. One of the things I’ve learned is that the people running our country — presidents, senators, congressmen, CEOs, hedge fund managers, banksters, etc. — aren’t the “best and brightest.” They’re generally people with average or slightly above-average IQs. True geniuses tend to be underachievers. Currently, a man named Christopher Langan is frequently credited as being the smartest person in America. Gifted with an IQ somewhere between 195 and 210 (Wikipedia), he is largely self-educated, in part because he couldn’t find anyone smart enough to teach him:
“After earning a perfect score on the SAT Langan attended Reed College and later Montana State University, but faced with financial and transportation problems, and believing that he could teach his professors more than they could teach him, he dropped out.
“He took a string of labor-intensive jobs, and by his mid-40s had been a construction worker, cowboy, forest service firefighter, farmhand, and for over twenty years, a bouncer on Long Island. He says he developed a ‘double-life strategy’: on one side a regular guy, doing his job and exchanging pleasantries, and on the other side coming home to perform equations in his head, working in isolation on his Cognitive-Theoretic Model of the Universe.”
By the way, I strongly recommend you read the complete Wikipedia article on Langan, because he’s fascinating. Here’s a guy who works at laboring jobs (he currently owns a horse ranch) but spends his spare time trying to work out the “Theory of Everything” that baffled Einstein and has led Hawking into all sorts of weird theorizing. In other words, Langan is trying to solve the biggest and most complex problem in the entire fucking universe, namely, the nature of the universe itself. He says it’s “both physical and mental”; how’s that for a brain-twister?
Well, I guess that’s a digression, and not truly relevant to most people. I fell into it because I happen to be a so-called “high-IQ” rabbit myself, so I’m sort of interested in the special problems faced by rabbits and people who suffer from the curse of having been born within the top 1% of the IQ curve. I’m all too familiar with the neuroses, social isolation, and other disadvantages that accrue to those of us with abnormally high IQs — we’re freaks of nature, and nobody likes us. We bust our asses pretending to be normal in the hopes of making a few friends.
Getting back to the main topic, and trying to make this relevant to people with mere Mensa-qualifying IQs, what I’m trying to say is that there are two ways to go, college or union trades, and either will work out fine in terms of the important things in life (food, shelter, medical care, and retirement), and books are frosting on the cake of life.
Bobby Fischer used to have an IQ of 187, which made him way smarter than me, but he’s dead so his IQ is now 0, which makes me currently smarter than him. For whatever that’s worth.
And before Republican smart guys get too carried away with themselves, I suggest they think about this: We’re all going to have identical IQs eventually.
@47
It might happen sooner than you think. We know that with elderly the less they use their brains the more dementia and alzheimer’s they have. I’m pretty convinced those breakdowns in neural networks start a lot sooner than old age.
Langan sounds like an interesting guy.
@48 I haven’t met Langan, and don’t want to, but I’ll read his book when it comes out. I have most of Hawking’s books, and frankly, I think he has more problems than MS. Hawking is bright, and has given serious thought to the problem of figuring out where the universe came from and what its outer edges look like, but lately he’s wandered off the mule path and into the canal. It’s my impression that if you think too hard about something, thinking tends to acquire a life of its own and can drag you into absurdities.
Although certain trolls are wont to accuse me of “senility,” I know I’m not senile, because I test this. Did you ever see the movie “Blue Thunder”? Remember the scenes where (the late … sniffle) Roy Scheider uses his wristwatch to test his sanity? Well, I do somewhat the same thing. For example, there’s an online vocabulary test with 10 questions that gives you 10 seconds to answer each question. To get a perfect score you have to answer every question correctly within 1 second. I still get a perfect score on this quiz at least once every day (and sometimes multiple times a day), so it seems highly unlikely that I’m “senile” as alleged by those certain trolls. (To put this in context, there are only two people and one rabbit in the entire world who post perfect scores on that quiz every day, and I’m one of them.)
Actually, I have really good prospects for (a) living a hell of a long time and (b) never going senile. Pop Rabbit passed away (sniffle) 5 days before his 99th birthday; his mommy lived to 92, and his cigar-smoking bachelor uncle lived to 96; almost everyone on his side of my family lived to be at least 90 years old. On Ma Rabbit’s side, Ma Rabbit lived to be 88 and her ma lived to be 88, and I’m talking about generations that had primitive veterinary care compared to what I have. I definitely have the DNA to make it to age 100, and I’m only 65 now, so I’m probably going to be kicking wingnut asses around the block and six ways to Sunday on this blog for another 3 1/2 decades. And NOBODY in the rabbit family EVER went senile. Pop Rabbit was mentally sharp until he lapsed into a coma 6 hours before he went to the Meadow In The Sky. Ma Rabbit was mentally sharp until she lapsed into a coma 5 days before she went to the Meadow In The Sky, and was still doing nuclear equations with her toes while in a coma. Senility just isn’t in my family’s DNA. But wingnuts will tell you any kind of shit to try to discredit someone — they don’t like being shown up by a rabbit, which is sort of understandable.
So, even though I’m in lousy health (thanks to Vietnam), I’m not about to go senile and it’s extremely likely that I will continue firing on all 150 of my mental cylinders far longer than our wingnut friends are comfortable with. Hell, I’ll still be posting here — and kicking a fresh crop of wingnut asses six ways to Sunday — long after they’re pushing up clover.
@21 Those of us who work in high tech have been watching this train wreck coming on for quite a while. WiMax never caught on here, partly because the government never bought into it and partly because 4G wireless is just plain better technology. The game was really over when Clearwire switched to basically reselling Sprint’s 4G bandwidth, and now all the mobile carriers (including Sprint) are offering their own little plug-in USB whiz-bangs at Fred Meyer that come with several gigs of prepaid data transfer for a few bucks.
@46 Roger, if I’m reading you correctly, I think what you’re saying is that “formal” education isn’t so important as simply doing something you’re good at…better yet if it’s something you love.
@33 Huh? Remember when OWS first got started and even the mainstream fishwrappers took note of the black-tie gathering overlooking them with bemusement? Which group was it who were doing the drinking?
@51 Yes. And if it makes the world a better place, so much the better.
At a more fundamental level, I think the people in the best position to change the world for the better are writers, rock musicians, and artists. Who would remember, or think about, Napoleon’s brutalities against the Spaniards were it not for Goya’s sketches? Who will ever forget the horrors of World War 1 trench warfare immortalized in Wilfred Owen’s poetry? Dancers and songwriters can change the world; politicans hardly ever do.
@41 “Anyone who actually finishes an accredited college with a bona-fide degree in anything will, over the long haul, make a lot more money than someone with no degree.”
Nobody remembers what they learned in their college courses. College students forget most of it within 5 days after finals. Course content isn’t the point. College teaches you how to think. It teaches you how to find information, compile it, analyze it, synthesize it, and turn raw information into useful judgments. If you don’t think being able to make good decisions is important, just look at what shape our country is in today because people with great credentials but lousy judgment and no ethics made bad decisions.
When is the Occupy Concrete rally?
When is the occupy Medina rally?