The education and industrial complex (again)

October 9, 2011

Reading through the Press newspaper recently, my blood pressure shot up as I came across yet another taxpayer-subsidised, half-page advertisement for Canterbury University. It seems Canterbury feels compelled to up its advertising to attract more students following a mini-exodus after the February earthquake. What added insult to injury though, was the “feature student” in the advertisement was a physical education student.

In terms of employment rates for graduates, PE students are right at the bottom of the heap. As Pink Floyd might say, “they missed the starting gun.” Admittedly I’m basing this on well-informed hearsay, but it’s open knowledge that 50 percent of teaching graduates don’t go into teaching, and physical education isn’t exactly the most academically demanding subject. If they have to advertise for students, can’t they at least promote subjects which they know are likely to get these indebted kids jobs?

To my mind the education industry shares a lot of similarities will the alternative health industry . Both are driven by the concept of market populism. That is, the uniformed consumer knows best and should be left unaided to make his or her spending decisions. Both greedily prey on desperate and fearful consumers unable to find accessible and independent information on the products their “industries” are selling.

Ultimately though, the education industry is much worse, and much more destructive, since it had the open support and funding of government, as well as the tacit support of media and big business.

Leave a Comment » | Education industrial complex, New Zealand culture | Permalink
Posted by mikecourtman

Asians and lowlifes

September 27, 2011

A popular theme in the New Zealand media’s coverage of racial issues is White (and sometimes Maori) proles bullying East Asians. The most frequent cited example of which is when a bunch of prole teenagers in a car shout abuse or throw something at a young Asian pedestrian.

Now it does seem to be true that East Asians are more likely to be victims of low-level racial abuse than working class Whites and Maoris. The reasons for this are varied. For one thing, East Asians are more likely to be regarded as nerdy, physically slight and middle-class and therefore a natural target of contempt for anti-social working class toughs. However, another more straight-forward reason is that young Asians are more likely to walk, cycle and catch buses.

In contemporary Australasian culture, cars are so universal that anyone not seen driving in one, who isn’t in jogging gear or walking a dog, immediately stands out like a sore thumb. A lone Asian student standing by a bus stop for 20 minutes while 500 vehicle go by, thus has a high chance of attracting some unwarranted attention from a car full of passing bogans.

While this lazy, anti-social behaviour from the safety of a car is annoying and cowardly, Asian students aren’t the only victims, pretty much anyone who’s spent time cycling or walking on a regular basis, will have been a victim of it at some stage or another. For example, I once cycled through a roundabout and nearly went head over handlebars from a beer bottle that had just been tossed out of the window by a passing motorist. Given that a truck was barreling behind me the results of falling off wouldn’t have been pretty. Sadly, the only way to avoid this kind of lowlife abuse to get off the street and into a car, which is a bit of a shame when your local council has just spent millions of dollars of ratepayers money on largely unused cycle lanes and upgraded bus services.

Of course a good case can be made that the very liberals who complain of anti-social prole behaviour are the ones who’ve allowed it to become more common in the first place. If children received tougher discipline when younger, and middle class whites weren’t so tolerant of anti-social prole behaviour (ie, exhibited more balls and less political correctness) then maybe we’d have a slightly more civilised society.

9 Comments | Media, New Zealand culture, Race, Western civilisation | Permalink
Posted by mikecourtman

The Invisible Ron Paul

September 8, 2011

 

Posted on August 27, 2011 by  Mark Amagi at GM’s Place

Well, GM, you asked for it, my opinion as to who would be the Republican Party’s best choice for President. I’ve gone back and forth between Chris Christie (who said he would not run), to Michelle Bachmann, to Rick Perry to Ron Paul, not necessarily in that order. As I see it, the three most important issues facing the nation in the 2012 Election cycle are the economic and debt crisis, the threat of radical Islam at home and in Europe, and the subversion of American ideals by political correctness. That pretty much covers the economic, foreign policy (not to forget China and the trade deficit, which is also part of our economic crisis), and the social/cultural arenas. As the United States is now in the throes of a severe economic crisis, I think that issue has to take precedence: without restoring our economy and getting our runaway spending and deficits under some semblance of manageable, our nation is in severe jeopardy of becoming another bankrupt, second rate power. The problem with the Republican field, as I see it, is that most of the candidates don’t really understand our current economic situation: this is not a typical cyclic recession that we can simply grow our way out of with a pro-business candidate. The gig is up: As John Mauldin argues in Endgame, we’re in a structural, balance sheet recession. Admittedly, Romney would be better on economics than Obama, but pro-business or not the USA is in for a long period of high unemployment as it works its way out of its current indebtedness. That being said, of all current Republican candidates, Ron Paul is the one that was most aware of and predicted our current financial crisis. Thus, he’s heads above the rest of the pack on that score. Where were Greenspan and Bernanke during the credit boom that led to our current bust: Asleep at the wheel, as were most of the political and establishment class.

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1 Comment | Elections, Financial collapse, Islam, United States | Tagged: , , , | Permalink
Posted by markamagi

A Conservative-Libertarian Reading List

July 18, 2011

I’ve always been a reader but I began a more disciplined reading program after I retired from my full-time position in 2008 and began working part time. Having read Jacques Barzun’s From Dawn to Decadence (New York: Harper Collins, 2000), a history of Western Civilization from 1500 to the present, I began with various readings in Western Civilization. A second influence was Irving Babbitt’s Literature and the American College (Washington, D.C.: National Humanities Institute, 1908/1986), which set me on track to read or re-read the Greeks, starting with Homer, the Tragedians, and the historians, Herodotus’ Histories and Thucydides’ The Peloponnesian War. Due to 9/11, I was also interested in reading about the contemporary clash between Islamist jihad and the West, and a result was my first written, though not first posted, blog, “The Clash of Civilizations or the Suicide of the West?” which was posted at GM’s Place in June 2009.

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5 Comments | Conservatism, Culture, Hayek, Immigration, Islam, Libertarianism | Tagged: , , , | Permalink
Posted by markamagi

Finance Capitalism and the Family Business

June 5, 2011

Posted by Mark Amagi

In The Present Age: Progress and Anarchy in Modern America (New York: Harper & Row, 1988), conservative sociologist Robert Nisbet discusses Harvard economist Joseph Schumpeter’s concept of the “evaporation” of property, or more specifically, the “Evaporation of Industrial Property” and the “Evaporation of Consumer Property,” in Schumpeter’s classic Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy (1942). Nisbet argued that the effect of the evaporation of industrial property, “looking at the matter solely from the property-holder’s viewpoint – was the substitution of the ‘soft’ property of the shares of stock and bonds for the ‘hard’ property of land, buildings, and machines that the  property-holder had once managed as well as owned” (p. 87). In other words, when shares of a company are sold on the stock exchange, “soft,” or passive property holding replaces the active property ownership of owner/entrepreneurs, who owned and managed their own companies. This is a phenomenon also articulated by James Burnham in his book, The Managerial Revolution, published in 1941, where Burnham essentially argued that a managerial elite had taken control of both economic and political institutions from both the owner-capitalist class in business and the elected politicians in government. Nisbet wrote, “An atmosphere of not only impersonality but irresponsibility is created by evaporated property. . . . Less and less seems to depend upon the traditional virtues of prudence and social responsibility in the husbanding of one’s wealth, and more and more depends upon Fortuna” (Ibid.). The stock market atmosphere of the casino “begins to permeate not only one’s economic life but also one’s familial and community life” (Ibid.). Workers and managers become increasingly mobile as loyalty to one’s company also evaporates, and a lifetime of service is replaced by the current average of 4 to 5 years per job. I’m not saying that this is all negative, but considering the effect upon family and community stability it can’t all be the good either.

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1 Comment | American Conservative, Economic issues, Ethics | Tagged: , , , , , , , | Permalink
Posted by markamagi

No wonder so many local graduates go overseas

June 1, 2011

Listening to late night talk radio last night I was amazed to hear that many New Zealand nursing graduates can’t find jobs in New Zealand – this despite a supposed nursing shortage and large numbers of overseas nurses from third world countries being employed here.

Thanks to the bums on seats policies of New Zealand universities there is also a big surplus of teaching graduates with primary, as well as secondary graduates in highly competitive fields like physical education, art and geography, struggling to find work. The universities already admit that 50 percent of teaching graduates don’t actually go into teaching, so in competitive subjects like physical education this percentage could be as high as 75 percent if truth were told.

It seems the government’s primary goal is to have a large reserve army of local nursing and teaching graduates on hand as the boomers retire. Unfortunately this model assumes that the current recession will only last a short time and that the boomers  won’t stay on and work part-time. It also means local graduates can’t start paying off there student loans until years after they graduate.

 

5 Comments | Education, Education industrial complex, NZ economy | Permalink
Posted by mikecourtman

Why Do They Call it the Mainstream Media?

June 1, 2011
From the USA
Posted by Mark Amagi

Why do they call it the mainstream media? Flipping through the Sunday shows this morning we get the following offerings: On NBC’s Meet the Press, David Gregory had one elite media approved Republican, Mike Murphy, along with author Andrew Ross Sorkin, New York Times financial writer and author of Too Big To Fail, Andrea Mitchell, Eugene Robinson, and Rep. Chris Van Hollen (D-MD) on their panel of guests. The latter three along with Gregory definitely represent the Left. The panel was preceded by a rather partisan and cynical exchange with Rep. Paul Ryan (R-WI) about his budget proposal’s plan to cut entitlements, particularly Medicare, followed by a softball exchange with Democrat Chris Van Hollen. Over on ABC’s This Week with Christiane Amanpour, George Will was the lone featured Republican on a panel of four Democrats, including host Amanpour. The so-called Mainstream Media pretends to represent America and yet both its Sunday news shows and other news programs are slanted on a spectrum of Left of center to far Left. So who do Democratic politicians like Senator Jay Rockefeller and the Obama Administration want to shut down: the lone conservative Right of center channel, Fox News? And yet, as usual, on Fox News Sunday with Chris Wallace there was a split panel of two Republicans, Paul Gigot and Liz Chaney, and two Democrats, Juan Williams and former Democratic Senator Evan Bayh. Of course it should be pointed out that none of the Republicans were far Right Republicans and none of the Dems were far Left Democrats. Fox News now has a line-up of commentators spanning the political spectrum from libertarians like John Stossel and Judge Andrew Napolitano to moderate Republicans like Bill O’Reilly, more partisan Republicans like Sean Hannity, and more controversial conservatives like Glenn Beck, soon to be off Fox’s line-up.

Many of the top draws on the Fox team have left lucrative positions with the so-called mainstream media, often due to the fact that their more conservative or libertarian perspectives were not appreciated, like Stossel, Brit Hume, Glenn Beck, and Bernard Goldberg to name a few. It wasn’t that long ago that one had a decent amount of choice in television news: I’d tune into This week with David Brinkley on ABC, Meet the Press with Tim Russert (a liberal but fair interviewer) on NBC, Stossel on ABC, Beck on CNN, even Chris Mathews before he discovered that “thrill going up [his] leg” for Obama produced some reasonably good commentary. Now, other than watching the MSM/Obama Sunday shows to check out the opposition, I find my TV news watching pretty much restricted to Fox except for some business news at CNBC. All this is not to say that Fox, like all TV news, leaves much to be desired, and any intelligent observer of world events must supplement his diet with other media, such as books, internet sites, journals, and newspapers; but it does go to say that if you want to watch something not slanted Left, Fox News is now the only alternative. Although maintaining a patina of pseudo objectivity, about all you’re going to find in the “mainstream” news is advocacy journalism tilted to the Left.

And yet despite the fact that the mainstream media has been in the tank for Obama and the Left, following Obama’s victory in 2008, Gallup Polls done in 2009 continue to show that conservatives outnumber liberals by a ratio of 2:1 (40% to 20%). So the question is: how can the so-called mainstream media pretend to be, and continue to call itself, mainstream, when it actually only represents the views of about 20% of the U.S. population at best? A second question which arises is that if conservatives and Republicans (obviously not always the same thing) represent the establishment and the rich according to the Leftwing mythos, how come they control only one major news channel while the Left controls all three major networks, taxpayer supported PBS, and cable channels CNN and MSNBC? Isn’t it about time we got some diversity in the news and talking heads establishment? Unfortunately, a majority of the voting American public formulate their opinions about who they will vote for based on what they view on television. It’s about time they were given a little genuine balance and objectivity.

1 Comment | Free Speech, Media, United States, US politics | Tagged: | Permalink
Posted by markamagi

The Tea Party and America’s Debt Crisis: Me-Too Republicanism or a Party for the American Middle Class

June 1, 2011
From the USA
Posted by Mark Amagi

As I’ve argued previously in The Emperor Has No Clothes, the tea party is a middle class movement, and as such it should resist the Republican alignment with Wall Street. I think that both the Republican Party and the tea party movement are at a crossroads. Many establishment Republicans have jumped on the tea party bandwagon, running as tea party conservatives. The question tea party members need to ask themselves is whether these so-called champions are just using the tea party for their own interests and ambitions; are they just subverting the tea party movement into Me-too Republicanism? This is the question I pose and attempt to answer in the following article in the belief that constructive criticism is more essential for a movement to mature than any form of uncritical cheer leading.

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1 Comment | Economic issues, Financial collapse, Trade, United States, US politics | Tagged: , , , , , | Permalink
Posted by markamagi

The Emperor Has No Clothes

June 1, 2011
Posted on 04/30/2011 by Mark Amagi

The Big Short: Wall Street’s Role in the Financial Crash of 2008

I gave a talk a couple of weeks ago about the global financial collapse of 2008 and how the current national debt crisis will result in the collapse of the U.S. dollar without a serious austerity program to rectify the situation. Recent events only indicate that the collapse might come sooner than I thought. As John Williams at Shadow Government Statistics has reported, real inflation is now at 8%. The U.S. Government keeps the official Consumer Price Index (CPI) artificially low by keeping everyday necessities like food and gas out of the index. Apparently, Ben Bernanke and his cohorts don’t have to buy food and gas. I recently read an article by a financial analyst entitled “Ben Bernanke: A Traitor to his Nation?” Such views would no doubt be considered “extreme” by the so-called mainstream media, but what I consider extreme is allowing the same group of corrupt, incompetent and stupid leaders that got us into this mess pretend to fix the problem they created while continuing to promote the same policies that will only bankrupt the U.S. economy. That, to my way of thinking, is “crazy.” As the saying goes, “insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results.” Yet that’s the path we find ourselves on.

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Leave a Comment » | American Conservative, Conservatism, Financial collapse, Inflation, monetary policy, US politics | Tagged: , , , , , , , , | Permalink
Posted by markamagi

Help for maths lightweights?

April 10, 2011

Until recently scientists have been at a loss to explain why some people have serious difficulties with mathematics despite having a relatively high IQ.

However, according to a recent copy of New Scientist magazine, researchers at Oxford University have  located a key area of brain involved in mathematical reasoning. Using rTMS technology (transcranial magnetic stimulation) they have found that when stimulation is applied to the right parietal lobe, number recall and calculation is enhanced, and decreased when this area of the brain is short-circuited by over-stimulation.

Since the frontal lobes are the main areas involved in general intelligence and behaviour control, it’s quite possible that someone could have a relatively high level of common sense and verbal ability, yet still struggle with many maths skills and concepts.

Transcranial magnetic stimulation is one of the most exiting new technologies in brain research and mental health therapy. If it turns out to be both effective and reasonably affordable, drug companies stand to lose a lot of money.

2 Comments | Cognitive enhancement, mental health, Technology | Permalink
Posted by mikecourtman

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