Our educated unemployed are most susceptible to demagoguery.
One of the sad and dangerous signs of our times is how many people are enthralled by words, without bothering to look at the realities behind those words.
One of those words that many people seldom look behind is “education.” But education can cover anything from courses on nuclear physics to courses on baton twirling.- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
When it comes to postgraduate study in tough fields such as math and science, you often find foreign students at American universities receiving more of those degrees than do Americans.
A recent headline in the Chronicle of Higher Education said: “Master’s in English: Will Mow Lawns.” It featured a man with that degree who has gone into the landscaping business because there is no great demand for people with master’s degrees in English.
Too many of the people coming out of even our most prestigious academic institutions graduate with neither the skills to be economically productive nor the intellectual development to make them discerning citizens and voters.
Students can graduate from some of the most prestigious institutions in the country without ever learning anything about science, mathematics, economics, or anything else that would make them either productive contributors to the economy or informed voters who can see through political rhetoric.
On the contrary, people with such “education” are often more susceptible to demagoguery than the population at large. Nor is this a situation peculiar to America. In countries around the world, people with degrees in soft subjects have been sources of political unrest, instability, and even mass violence.
Nor is this a new phenomenon. A scholarly history of 19th-century Prague referred to “the well-educated but underemployed” Czech young men who promoted ethnic polarization there — a polarization that not only continued but escalated in the 20th century to produce bitter tragedies for both Czechs and Germans.
In other central European countries, between the two world wars, a rising class of newly educated young people bitterly resented having to compete with better qualified Jews in the universities and with Jews already established in business and the professions. Anti-Semitic policies and violence were the result.
It was much the same story in Asia, where successful minorities such as the Chinese in Malaysia were resented by newly educated Malays without either the educational or business skills to compete with them. These Malaysians demanded — and got — heavily discriminatory laws and policies against the Chinese.
Similar situations developed at various times in Nigeria, Romania, Sri Lanka, Hungary, and India, among other places.
Many Third World countries have turned out so many people with diplomas — but without meaningful skills — that “the educated unemployed” became a cliché among people who study such countries. This has not only become a personal problem for those individuals who have been educated, or half-educated, without acquiring any ability to fulfill their rising expectations, it has become a major economic and political problem for these countries.
Such people have proven to be ideal targets for demagogues promoting polarization and strife. We in the United States are still in the early stages of that process. But you need only visit campuses where whole departments feature soft courses preaching a sense of victimhood and resentment, and see the consequences in racial and ethnic polarization on campus.
There are too many other soft courses that allow students to spend years in college without becoming educated in any real sense.
We don’t need more government “investment” to produce more of such “education.” Lofty words such as “investment” should not blind us to the ugly reality of political pork-barrel spending.
— Thomas Sowell is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution. © 2011 Creators Syndicate, Inc.
___________________________________________________________________________________
Why the Hurry?
The president should have given intelligence analysts more time.
For a week, people have been asking, “Why won’t the president release Osama bin Laden’s photo?” That’s the wrong question. We should be asking, “Why was Barack Obama in such a hurry to tell us bin Laden was dead?”
The White House says the information in bin Laden’s compound is the equivalent of a “small college library,” potentially containing incalculably valuable and unique data on al-Qaeda operations, personnel, and methods.- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
“It’s going to be great even if only 10 percent of it is actionable,” a government official told Politico’s Mike Allen.
I’m no expert on such matters — though I’ve talked to several about this — but even a casual World War II buff can understand that the shelf life of actionable intelligence would be extended if we hadn’t told the whole world, and al-Qaeda in particular, that we had it.It’s a bit like racing to the microphones to announce you’ve stolen the other team’s playbook before you’ve had a chance to use the information in the big game.
But that’s exactly what President Obama did. He raced to spill the beans. The man couldn’t even wait until morning. At just after 9:45 p.m., the White House communications director, Dan Pfeiffer, informed the media: “POTUS to address the nation tonight at 10:30 p.m. Eastern Time.”
The announcement came less than three hours after Obama had been informed that there was a “high probability” that bin Laden was dead and that the Navy SEAL helicopters had returned to Afghanistan.
In other words, it seems that the White House planned to crow as soon as possible. Why? Nobody I’ve talked to can think of a reason that doesn’t have to do with politics or hubris.
Yes, killing Osama bin Laden would have been a big secret that would have been hard to keep for long. Certainly, Pakistan would grow agitated if we simply said nothing about the incursion, though sweating the Janus-faced Pakistanis with silence for a couple of days might yield its own intelligence rewards. In other words, even waiting 24 hours might generate some interesting “chatter.” The Pakistanis working with al-Qaeda certainly would have been the first to spread the news that bin Laden was dead or captured.
But the real treasure trove is that “college library” of intelligence.
And while reports are pouring out from a gloating White House that’s leaking like the Titanic in its final hours, one can only assume our analysts have barely begun to exploit the data. Couldn’t they have at least tried to give the CIA a week, a day, even a few more hours to look at it all before letting Ayman al-Zawahiri and the rest of al-Qaeda know about it? Why give him the slightest head start to go even further underground?
Operation Neptune Spear was the culmination of years of patient intelligence-gathering. The CIA identified bin Laden’s compound nearly ten months ago, in August 2010, and monitored it by satellite and from a secret safe house in Abbottabad at a cost of tens of millions of dollars.
And even that was breakneck speed compared with the years our government spent hunting bin Laden. In 2002, the CIA heard about a possible courier codenamed Abu Ahmed al-Kuwaiti. In 2004, it learned that he might have worked closely with bin Laden. It wasn’t until 2007 that it got al-Kuwaiti’s real name. It took two more years to track him down to a specific region.
That, of course, barely skims the surface of American patience and sacrifice. We’ve spent billions of dollars and lost numerous American and allied lives trying to defeat al-Qaeda. Those efforts have ripped apart our politics, from the debates over waterboarding and what some claim is torture to extraordinary rendition, black sites, and Guantanamo Bay. Some of those techniques and decisions seem to have led us to bin Laden’s door.
Surely one more week of harmlessly searching hard drives while the public was kept in the dark wouldn’t have been too great an additional burden. The White House would have still gotten their moment to preen and to ride their bump in the polls as far as they could. All they had to do is hold their tongues for a little while longer.
Obama says he won’t release bin Laden’s death photo for fear that American triumphalism might hurt American interests. Would that he had the same concern when it came to White House triumphalism.
— Jonah Goldberg is editor-at-large of National Review Online and a visiting fellow at the American Enterprise Institute. You can write to him by e-mail at JonahsColumn@aol.com,
____________________________________________________________________________________
America doesn’t have royalty, a fact of which we were all reminded when William and Kate got married in shoes which likely cost more than the White House’s art collection . . . or maybe the White House itself.
At least we had the Kennedy family.But William and Kate hadn’t even had time to return the duplicate toaster gifts to Harrod’s, when our collective marriage-euphoria was punctured by news of the dissolution of the marriage of Arnold Schwarzenegger and Maria Shriver.
Maria, of course, is the daughter of Sargent and Eunice Kennedy Shriver (Eunice was the sister of John F. Kennedy). An old People magazine article reported on the details of the day on which she exchanged wedding vows with muscle-man Arnold at St. Francis Xavier’s Roman Catholic Church — the same place where Maria’s uncles John and Robert served as altar boys many years before. Thousands of well-wishers gathered behind police barricades to catch a glimpse of the glamorous Kennedy family and Arnold’s body-building buddies. Jackie O dazzled in a navy blue suit, between John Jr. and Maurice Tempelsman. The (ten!) bridesmaids’ dresses were blue, pink and violet silk, and the bride’s Christian Dior gown had an eleven-foot train. Another American near-royal, Oprah Winfrey, read Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s “How Do I Love Thee?” to wedding guests, who’d later feast on a wedding cake which weighed 425 pounds. Arnold gave his in-laws a silk-screen portrait of his bride created by Andy Warhol, who was one of the many famous guests. At the time, Arnold vowed to Maria’s parents, “I love her and I will always take care of her. Nobody should worry.”
The Schwarzenegger-Shriver split is yet another reminder that marriages need work, every day of every year. There’s no point at which a marriage is “safe” from challenges . . . not in the first year, the fifth year, or the twenty-fifth year.
Do we need this reminder, in an era in which so many people say they are “going through a divorce” in some passive way, as if fog settles over homes and unwitting spouses must grope their way out of an unfortunate circumstance beyond their control?
Nope.
But here we are, so let’s just say it anyway. Attractiveness, muscles, silk bridesmaid dresses, royalty, fantastic jaw lines, cool jobs, historically interesting families, and long bridal trains do not prevent divorce. What does?
Ideally, weddings are the beginning of journeys, covenants before God made in front of faith communities, vows which last as long as life itself. Yet church-goers get divorced at the same rate as non-Christians.
So even if you don’t have millions of dollars or a new movie coming out, we should all take a moment to pray for this family. . . and perhaps our own as well.
— Nancy French is the author of the upcoming Home and Away: A Story of Family in a Time of Warand can be followed on Facebook.
No comments:
Post a Comment