Worst Side Effect of Recession? Endless Plague of Perpetual Grad Students

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OK, this is a pet peeve of mine from way back. When I was in college in the late ’70s and early ’80s, there was a distinct group of hippie leftovers who hung around the campus pub a lot while, supposedly, working on their master’s degrees.

They didn’t seem particularly smart or studious. Rather, they struck me as having fallen in love with the student lifestyle, which was far less strenuous than going out into the world to work for a living. And then there was that one ditzy girl from my art classes (I minored in art with an emphasis in graphic design) who, at homecoming a couple years after graduation, informed me that she was now pursuing a master’s degree.

At the time, my day job was forklift driver in an industrial warehouse, and I realized that this chick was going to grad school not because she had any special aptitude, but rather because her Daddy could afford it.

From personal experiences with these “perpetual student” types, I formed a perception of them as indolent and overprivileged, seeking sanctuary from the hardships of the real world. They reminded me of a line from Ghostbusters:

Personally, I liked the university. They gave us money and facilities. We didn’t have to produce anything! You’ve never been out of college! You don’t know what it’s like out there! I’ve worked in the private sector. They expect results.

Which brings us to this story from the Wall Street Journal:

College graduates who took a detour around the weak job market by going back for advanced degrees are beginning to emerge from those programs — and finding job prospects aren’t much better than they were a couple of years ago. . . .
Caitlin Johnson, 23 years old. . . 2009 graduate of Massachusetts Institute of Technology with a B.S. in computer-science and engineering, she said she was unable to land any of the 10 positions she applied for.
So she opted to stay at MIT for her master’s in engineering. Having just finished her first year of the two-year program, Ms. Johnson said she might look for a job at the end of the summer to start after she completes the degree next year. But finding graduate school more appealing and facing a job market that remains weak, she said she would most likely go on to earn her Ph.D. . . .

(Notice she “opted to stay at MIT,” where tuition is $37,782 a year. Spending Daddy’s money, you see.)

Aneri Patel, 25, graduated from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 2007 with an undergraduate degree in international relations. She landed a good job with a consulting firm, but decided to go to the London School of Economics in 2008 to learn more about climate change and be a stronger candidate in the job market. She never imagined how bad the job market would get while she was overseas in graduate school.
Since returning from London in January — her advanced degree in hand — she said she had applied for dozens of positions, but had yet to secure work.
“With international work experience, coupled with my internships at fairly respectable places and my master’s, I thought I’d get immediate interviews,” she said. “It was tough.”

Life is tough when you’re an international relations major with special training in “climate change.” Maybe you should have studied something useful, like alchemy, phrenology or necromancy.

Anyway, instead of getting a job as a waitress or a retail clerk — i.e., earning your keep while looking for something closer to your preferred line of work — these overprivileged slackers go back to grad school and mooch along for another couple of years. The final wisdom here comes from Monty at AOSHQ:

Many students get stuck in a “failure to launch” cycle that is familiar to the situation in Europe: students endlessly chase meaningless degrees that have no practical application in the real world mainly because academia is an alternative to holding a job rather than training for a job.

The Lockerbie Punchline

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by Smitty

The blogosphere has been reacting to the news that Abdelbaset Ali Mohmed Al Megrahi, the Lockerbie bomber, could survive another couple of decades.

BlogProf has a great clip that casts dhimmi Justice Kenny MacAskill’s craven words back into Braveheart for a William Wallace reaction.

Ace has hate in his heart, but no flaming skull.

The punchline, though, is that Al Megrahi will likely succeed the 68 year old Charles JohnsonMoammar Qaddafi as ruler of Libya at some near date.

The New Ten Buck Friday Poll Is Up

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by Smitty

The Lonely Conservative has the details. My local hopeful, Patrick Murray, is on this one, though going against Gentleman Jim Moran is going to be a tough slog.
Also Birchtree Sustainable Studios has a fine piece of patriotic art on offer, suitable for just about any American occasion. Check it out.

Update: the Camp of the Saints calls ’em like they squeeze ’em:

Moran is one of the worst human beings ever to sit in the Congress and, considering that august body has always acted like a magnet to the dishonorable and disreputable, that’s saying a lot.

Perversity of the Euro-Left:
‘Sexual Liberation’ for Children

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From the German magazine Spiegel:

It has since faded into obscurity, but the members of the 1968 movement and their successors were caught up in a strange obsession about childhood sexuality. It is a chapter of the movement’s history which is never mentioned in the more glowing accounts of the era. On this issue, the veterans of the late ’60s student movement seem to have succumbed to acute amnesia; an analysis of this aspect of the student revolution would certainly be worthwhile. . . .

Read the whole thing, but be warned it’s some sick stuff. Perhaps the most interesting aspect is that, because of feminism, German left-wing journals dropped their advocacy of “progressive sexuality” with little girls in the early ’70s, whereas the Marxist boy-buggerers kept publishing until 1994.

Someone linked this article in a comment thread yesterday. I suppose they found it at Pat Dollard’s site.

Related: Pedophiles using Wikipedia to promote their perversion. (Via Van Helsing at Moonbattery.)

Category: Sex

Does Not Caring About The Country Correlate With Thuggery?

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by Smitty

If patriotism means caring about your country, then what does this CNSNews story tell us?

Conservatives are more than twice as likely as liberals to express very strong patriotism, according to a new USA Today/Gallup poll in which 48 percent of conservatives said they were “extremely patriotic,” but only 19 percent of liberals made that claim.

The liberal response takes on a more sinister tone when you consider the setup for ransacking that occurred in Congress Friday. Uncoverage points to a Human Events story by Connie Hair that should have all of us writing our Congresscritters. In my case, to scream: “House Democrats ‘Deem’ Faux $1.1 Trillion Budget ‘as Passed’”.

Key points from the House Republican Budget staff on the House Democrats’ deeming resolution:

  • This is not a budget. The measure fails to meet the most basic, commonly understood objectives of any budget. It does not set congressional priorities; it does not align overall spending, tax, deficit, and debt levels; and it does nothing to address the runaway spending of Federal entitlement programs.
  • It is not a ‘congressional budget resolution.’ The measure does not satisfy even the most basic criteria of a budget resolution as set forth in the Congressional Budget Act.
  • It creates a deception of spending ‘restraint.’ While claiming restraint in discretionary spending, the resolution increases non-emergency spending by $30 billion over 2010, and includes a number of gimmicks that give a green light to higher spending.
  • It continues relying on the flawed and over-sold pay-as-you-go [pay-go] procedure. Pay-go – which Democrats have used mainly to raise taxes, and have ignored when it was inconvenient – does nothing to reduce deficits or restrain spending growth in existing law.
  • Outsourcing fiscal responsibilities. The measure is another hand-off by the Democratic Majority of Congress’s power of the purse – this time relying on the Fiscal Commission created by the President to do Congress’s job.

The Human Events link includes a URL for an 11 page .pdf from the Republican Caucus offering further details on the size, shape, color, and aroma of the loaf the Democrats have just delivered.
I don’t know what the policy equivalent of a full-on riot would be, but this seems like a predicate for pure, arbitrary ransacking of the public till. It seems like maybe the Democrats realize something about (a) their longevity or (b) that of the country with which they are less than forthcoming.
Fellow VA-8 residents are encouraged to check out this new Jim Moran on Demand business and see if the chap can stand and deliver on this outrage.

My Chance Meeting With Charles Bolden

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by Smitty

This is one of those moments when you wish you kept a journal. It seemed that the tragic death of three Midshipmen in 1994 was the occasion for being in the Chapel of the Navy for a memorial service, and finding myself standing next to then-Colonel Bolden, the Dep. ‘Dant.

What I mostly remember was the astronoaut wings on his uniform:

In any case, that was 15+ years ago. He may have gone from literally out-of-this-world coolness to Mark 1, Mod 0 apparatchik, for all I know. Here he is, via PowerLine, where Paul seems concerned that the theraputic language in use may echo other policy confusion.
However, let’s note that this is Al frickin’ Jazeera here, and acquire some more data before pronouncing the man a complete squish.
I have no doubt that, if we want to pull our head out of the Socialist toilet and return to spacefaring, then Bolden is more than capable of leading that charge. Not a milquetoast, the fellow.

Democrat Stimulus Drum Corps

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The Dow Jones Industrial Average is down more than 700 points since June 21, having lost more than 1,500 points (13.6%) from its late April peak at 11,205. The Dow closed Friday below 9,700 — a level not seen since early October 2009 — and talk of a “double-dip recession” is now far more common than when I discussed the possibility May 9 or again on June 1.

What to do about this? Robert Reich offers a familiar stew of his pet lefty schemes, and most liberals approach the double-dip problem in the same don’t-waste-a-crisis mode: “Hey, look! A good excuse for more deficit spending and economic regulation!”

Playing the devil’s advocate, Daniel Gross at Slate asks, “What’s so bad about deflation?” Which is to say, why not let the market work and take the slack out the economic sails, so that we can begin a real recovery based on a solid foundation?

“Unacceptable!” Matthew Yglesias screams. Yglesias has been maniacally beating the stimulus drums like Gene Krupa on meth.

Yglesias doesn’t understand economics, and he particularly doesn’t understand why the failure of Keynesian stimulus policies is so predictable.

The bursting of the housing bubble, which precipitated the October 2008 financial crisis, was the result of excessive private debt, people borrowing mortgage money they couldn’t afford to repay. The Keynesian “solution” is to increase public-sector debt via deficit spending intended to stimulate consumer demand. (This kind of illogic is why Nancy Pelosi thinks unemployment checks create jobs.)

What actually happens (what Keynesians can’t seem to grasp) is that deficit spending siphons capital out of the private sector, as bond sales soak up investor dollars that might otherwise have been invested in businesses, either as loans (corporate bonds) or stock purchases. You can’t make capitalism work without capital, and so private-sector job-creation fails to materialize — “unexpectedly,” as the MSM keeps saying, although it is only unexpected to people who didn’t pay attention to how Keynesian policies produced “stragflation” in the 1970s.

For a little more than a year, from March 2009 to April 2010, Obamanomics appeared to be working and the stock market almost doubled in value from its March 2009 low nearly 6,600. But that wasn’t really a recovery, it was a dead-cat bounce.

Now that the bounce is over, people are sobering up and recognizing that (a) Obamanomics hasn’t worked and (b) we are actually worse off as a nation than we would have been had we avoid all that “stimulus” spending. The FDIC has already closed 85 banks this year, and the worst of the commercial real-estate meltdown is still ahead of us.

All that Yglesias and the rest of the Democrat Stimulus Drum Corps care about is politics, using deficit spending to create the appearance of recovery, so as to limit their party’s mid-term losses. And they’re already preparing to blame Republicans for all that ails the country. Michael Laprarie at Wizbang:

Democrats can whine about “failed policies of the Bush Administration” until they are blue in the face, but nothing they say can disguise the dire economic straits that their own policies have directly led this country into.

Well, they’ll try to disguise it, and the MSM will be only too happy to assist. It’s just a damned shame that the Republicans don’t have a credible spokesman to call them to account for it.