High time

Instapundit:

I PREDICT MORE SUITS LIKE THIS: Unemployed Grad Files $50million Class Action v. Law School for Misrepresenting Placement Data. “Plaintiff would not have attended TJSL and incurred more than $150,000 in school loans if she knew the truth about her job prospects upon graduation.”

Good, and past due. Colleges have grown fat on the student debt scam, so this is going to be interesting. The parallel to the sub-prime scandal is clear enough. In the case of mortgages, people were enticed into debt on the shaky promise of a future profit when they sold the house; in the case of student loans, young people are enticed into debt on the shaky promise of a future profit when they enter a higher-paying career. Same model, same miserable result. (The education case is probably the more egregious of the two: Nobody can predict housing prices, but a university Gender Studies department knows damn well its BA degree is almost certainly worth nothing in the job market, and may even have negative value. That a college would even make it possible to graduate with such a degree is outrageous.)

University departments and programs are supposed to keep abreast of labor market trends in their specialty area, to know the likely future value of what they're selling. And, when it's in their interest, they pretend that they do:

Every time a department wants funding to launch a new program, the pitch that's trotted out is that there is, or soon will be, a large unmet demand for the kind of people that will be produced by the new program. That makes it sound like they really have their finger on the pulse of the labor market, doesn't it? But meanwhile they're claiming ignorance about the fact that the graduates they're now cranking out have no job prospects. I want to see that explained, from the witness stand.

From law schools to philosophy majors and everything in between, just to pump out graduates with no concern about their future prospects is bad enough. But when those graduates have been allowed and encouraged to pile up mountains of student loan debt in the process, it's simply criminal. There is no conceivable excuse for operating that way, except greedy self interest. The student loan scam has been an enormous boon to the business of higher education; for the student victims, the result is to go forth under a pile of non-forgivable debt that can't even be cleared by bankruptcy: Good luck, new grads -- and thanks for everything.

Byron

Best-read cities

The one that surprises me is Miami at no. 6. I would not have figured St. Louis for a spot in the top twenty best-read, either.

These are individual cities, not Standard Metropolitan Statistical Areas (SMSAs), so ones with relatively big university populations will have an advantage. If it was SMSAs, then I'd guess the Wash, D.C. SMSA would be tops, because Washington, Alexandria, and Arlington are all separately on the list.

If you're going to compare cities, it would be better to put cities over 250,000 population in a separate category. No city of much size can possibly compete with Cambridge, Berkeley, Ann Arbor, Boulder, etc., where university populations are such a large segment of the total.

Byron



Amazon.com Reveals the Most Well-Read Cities in America

Cambridge, Mass., tops the list with the most books, magazines and newspapers purchased per capita of any city in the United States

SEATTLE, May 26, 2011 (BUSINESS WIRE) --

(NASDAQ: AMZN)--Just in time for the summer reading season, Amazon.com announced its list of the Top 20 Most Well-Read Cities in America. After compiling sales data of all book, magazine and newspaper sales in both print and Kindle format since Jan. 1, 2011, on a per capita basis in cities with more than 100,000 residents, the Top 20 Most Well-Read Cities are:

1. Cambridge, Mass.    11. Knoxville, Tenn.
2. Alexandria, Va.     12. Orlando, Fla.
3. Berkeley, Calif.    13. Pittsburgh
4. Ann Arbor, Mich.    14. Washington, D.C.
5. Boulder, Colo.      15. Bellevue, Wash.
6. Miami               16. Columbia, S.C.
7. Salt Lake City      17. St. Louis, Mo.
8. Gainesville, Fla.   18. Cincinnati
9. Seattle             19. Portland, Ore.
10. Arlington, Va.     20. Atlanta

Obamanomics plunges along

The US economy is in the best of hands:

Pending Home Sales Plunge, Reaching Seven-Month Low...

Pending sales of existing U.S. homes dropped far more than expected in April to touch a seven-month low, a trade group said on Friday, dealing a blow to hopes of a recovery in the housing market.

The National Association of Realtors Pending Home Sales Index dropped 11.6 percent to 81.9 in April, the lowest since September.

Economists polled by Reuters had expected pending home sales to fall 1.0 percent.

Gee, and here I always thought Spring was when more homes got sold, not fewer. Obviously I don't fully understand Obamanomics...

Today's Quiz:

Who would you rather have as president: (a) someone with everyday experience and a modicum of common sense, or (b) an arrogant, Harvard-educated political theorist with a left-wing agenda?

Which do you think would make the better president: (a) Obama, or (b) a person picked at random from the Fort Worth Business Directory?

The correct answers are (a) and (b).

Byron

Shocking

Not. The only surprise here is that HUD squandering doesn't run into the Billions instead of mere hundreds of millions. (Color me highly skeptical about that, btw.) If I were a developer, the very sound of "Housing and Urban Development" would make my pupils dilate, among other things.

Whenever the word 'government' appears in close proximity to the word 'housing' sirens and flares should go off to signal investigative committees to get in gear, pronto. Corruption, graft, and rip-offs of every kind and description, eminent domain abuse, wrecking of communities and neighborhoods, even the destruction of pretty much the entire housing market itself and with it the equity savings of tens of millions of Americans -- when it comes to government mischief, housing is the Hydrogen Bomb.

Byron

via Instapundit:

Washington Post: Million Dollar Wasteland: A trail of stalled or abandoned HUD projects.

The federal government’s largest housing construction program for the poor has squandered hundreds of millions of dollars on stalled or abandoned projects and routinely failed to crack down on derelict developers or the local housing agencies that funded them.

It’s like it’s just a bunch of corruption masquerading as an effort to help the poor.

Wow! Oh, wait...

AP-Gfk poll: Obama approval hits 60 percent

AP finds an amazing turnaround for Obama! On everything: foreign policy, handling the economy, every aspect of governance!

Too amazing. Here's how you cook up a mess like that:

And the award for the most ridiculous poll sampling goes to … AP!
Republicans under-sampled by almost HALF. Hey, whatever it takes, right?

This must set a new standard for most blatant manipulation of poll results, ever, a record I think held by Pravda up until now.

Heckuva job, AP!

Now watch the rest of the liberal media run with this nonsense.

Byron

Taking credit

The guy is completely shameless.

The First-Person Presidency

"Senator Obama opposed tribunals, renditions, Guantanamo, preventive detention, Predator-drone attacks, the Iraq War, wiretaps, and intercepts — before President Obama either continued or expanded nearly all of them, in addition to embracing targeted assassinations, new body scanning and patdowns at airports, and a third preemptive war against an oil-exporting Arab Muslim nation — this one including NATO efforts to kill the Qaddafi family. The only thing more surreal than Barack Obama’s radical transformation is the sudden approval of it by the once hysterical Left...

Okay, the public perhaps understands all that hypocrisy as the stuff of presidential politics. But I think it will not quite accept the next step of taking full credit in hyperbolic first-person fashion for operations that would have been impossible had his own views prevailed.

Bizarre

Lawrence O'Donnell is so pretzel-brained he actually thinks you can put time on fast-forward to see what your current decision should be given future events. It has to be some kind of physical disorder, a disability involving basic time perception and sequencing of events.

I do not exaggerate.

Obamanomics proceeds apace

Unemployment back up to 9%.

NPR this morning touted the fact that 244,000 jobs were created, more than expected.

NPR somehow forgot to mention that 62,000 of those jobs came from McDonald's.


Byron

Pass the salt

Thursday, May 05, 2011
Pass the salt shaker?
CNN Health:

Those who consumed the least salt had a 56 percent higher risk of death from a heart attack or stroke compared with those who had the highest consumption, even after controlling for obesity, cholesterol, smoking, diabetes, and other risk factors....

A few days ago, the news was that omega-3 fish oil, supposedly good for the heart, is associated with a large increase in the chances of the worst form of prostate cancer.

Health advice changes and reverses so often, I'm starting to think the best advice is to just ignore it all and enjoy life while you can.

Heart Muscles And Fat

Gee, what do you know?

…eliminating or severely limiting fats from the diet may not be beneficial to cardiac function in patients suffering from heart failure, a study at Case Western Reserve University School of Medicine reports. Results from biological model studies conducted by assistant professor of physiology and biophysics Margaret Chandler, PhD, and other researchers, demonstrate that a high-fat diet improved overall mechanical function, in other words, the heart’s ability to pump, and was accompanied by cardiac insulin resistance.

How many people has the FDA and the nutrition/industrial complex killed with the fatophobia over the past decades? I’m pretty sure my father was one of them.

http://www.transterrestrial.com/?p=33578

Atkinson was right: Low carbs is key, low fat diets are so much hooey. Carbs drive insulin, and insulin is what drives fat accumulation. Would anyone be surprised if the famous food pyramid pushed by the FDA is actually upside down? Not me.

Byron

Obamanomic miracle continues

Instapundit:

UNEXPECTEDLY! NEW JOBLESS CLAIMS JUMP TO 8-MONTH HIGH: “New U.S. claims for unemployment aid unexpectedly rose last week to touch their highest level in eight months, pushed up by factors ranging from spring break layoffs to the introduction of an emergency benefits program, a government report showed on Thursday.”

Or, you know, the whole recovery could basically be stalling.

Wait, benefits programs encourage unemployment? I think that means the promise of new unemployment benefits brought discouraged workers (people who have given up the job search and so are not counted as unemployed) out of the woodwork to claim the new benefits. The question that raises, of course, is how large is the number of labor force dropouts, and what would the unemployment rate look like if they were counted as unemployed? Much higher than 8.8% we can be sure.

Byron

Arab Spring?

A dead OBL ends up merely a footnote because, so far, it's a democratic Iraq that's turning out to be the model, as neo-cons like me argued it could. I think there have been two keys to the flow of events.

(1) First was Bush's steadfastness and foresight with respect to Iraq. He was spot-on correct from Day One, and he never wavered. History will show that the defeat of Saddam Hussein is where necessary transformational reform in the Arab world began. The Iraq War was the right war, in the right place, at the right time. The difficulty was that the rationale for the war was a long-term, civilizational rationale, and as such it was beyond the capacity or willingness of many people to comprehend. It still is.

(2) Second was the 9-11 attacks themselves, which were an enormous, decisive strategic mistake. The Islamists got over-confident and impatient, foolishly went for a kill-shot on the US. To say they over-played their hand is to vastly understate the magnitude of the error. The 9-11 attacks were probably decisive for the future of the Mid-East, because they created enough public outrage in the US to make launching the Iraq War possible; and it's the results of that war, in turn, that have made the transformation of the Arab world a possibility (see #1). No 9-11 attacks, no Iraq War -- and it's painful to imagine what the situation would be now.

Byron