Whether you be man or woman you will never do anything in this world without courage. It is the greatest quality of the mind next to honor.
James Lane Allen
Tweet of the Day
Matt Walsh is right:"Four Bankruptcies" Trump is an unqualified, ill-tempered POTUS candidate.The problem is his cult.http://t.co/s9W9jX6koF
— Ronald Guillemette (@raguillem) August 13, 2015
Image of the Day |
| Courtesy of Greg McCown |
Facebook Corner
(Rand Paul 2016). Rand Paul wants Arab boots on the ground, not American.
So much for Jeb learning from his family's mistakes. No more meddling in the Middle East/Gulf Region. Rand Paul needs to run against over a generation of unnecessary wars, wasted American blood and treasure.
(Reason). Two-Thirds of Americans Favor Citizenship for Illegal Immigrants
Absolutely 100% AGREE. Under our traditional open immigration policies, our country grew the fastest and became the world's leading economy. It wasn't until the WWI era we saw the ugly heads of the Know Nothings, protectionist unionists, xenophobes and bigots who pushed corrupt un-American restrictions on immigration. Anytime the government seeks to prohibit a market though unreasonable restrictions, it results in a dysfunctional state of affairs like the status quo.
Like Griswold points out, in the post-WWII era, over 1M Latin American immigrants were arrested a year around the border. We implemented the Braceros program, and arrests dropped by 95%. The unions forced JFK/LBJ to end the Braceros program and to the present day block reasonable temporary worker programs. But if you listened to the GOP debate last week, hear anything about treating the disease (caused by bad, corrupt special-interest, anti-liberty policy) vs. the symptoms? No, you heard the "small-government" GOP promise to throw more money at the border and Big INS. Only Rubio got his finger on the problem when he talked about 15-year wait periods--but he didn't follow up with the obvious pro-liberty solution of open immigration. The anti-immigrants are closet Big Government Statists who are scapegoating aliens for a problem government caused.
(FEE). As long as students are only going to college to get a degree, the classroom will continue to decline in quality.
I'm a former junior professor, mostly at state branch universities, who hasn't taught for several years, leaving academia in the middle of a budget-cutting recession. One problem I saw (in business schoom MIS) is that the faculty incentive systems were based on short-term incentives (e.g., not on graduation rates, student placement, etc.) From a teaching perspective, student evaluation measures were subjective in nature. This often led to pandering strategies, easy grades, less rigorous requirements. (I had upper-division students who had never coded a program from scratch before).
I got criticized from students for being "unfair' for requiring more effort than the popular instructor down the hall who required no programming and gave easy A's or the history course they were acing at a fraction of the time. I pursued Asian graduate students who had violated academic honesty policy and found myself attacked by senior faculty and administrators who asserted that I was sabotaging their lucrative foreign student program. My fellow area faculty and I were trying to strengthen an undergraduate major requirement from 9 to 18 semester hours, and students fought to keep the old system, although another branch school required 21 hours, exposure to IBM mainframes, and recruiters were hotly pursuing their major graduates.
My perception is most of my students came to my class to get a card punch on their job ticket--the less hassle, the better. My colleagues often did poor jobs covering course prerequisites. Just to give an example, at a west Texas university, I was teaching a database course requiring data structures. I soon discovered 90% of my students did not know what a linked list was (it should have been review material). I paused the course and gave some remedial lectures. Do you think they were appreciative? They thought I was teaching too much material in one course, etc. It's a problem of incentives; I was operating under my own professional standards.
Let's also note that it's you're in an intellectually or otherwise demanding discipline, e.g., engineering, pre-med, nursing, math, accounting, computer science, etc., it's probably not going to be sexy like an FEE or Mises.org seminar, where you are hearing classical liberal ideas for the first time. For example, computer programming requires the development of certain different skills. There's a certain level of accomplishment in developing a solution, especially novel, more efficient one. But in a sense it's like fall college football game. The game itself is thrilling, but there are training days, nauseating twice-a-day workouts, endless practices and workouts, game planning, etc.
Marriage and Family
Political Humor: Trump says it all, PERIOD!
Political Cartoon
 |
| Courtesy of the artist via James Meeley |
 |
| Courtesy of Bob Gorrell via Townhall |
Kenny Rogers, "Twenty Years Ago". One of my Top 5 Rogers favorites; I think this may be the last Rogers hit that I'm familiar with; I was mostly following adult contemporary at the time.
