This first story about college tuition is an eye opener....a must read if you are involved with kids in school.....
1/ The image of universities promulgated in the media are noble institutions of higher learning, with benefits to the community and their students, and this used to be true 30 years ago. The reality is today that the only other area that has seen the kind of price escalation like college tuition is medical costs, and we know this is because of the rampant greed of drug companies, hospitals and medical providers, and the way they have paid off or intimidated the regulators. However, university costs have gone up at twice the rate of medical costs.
The narrative from university administrators is now that since a college degree is such good value in the job market, why shouldn't the students pay for it and so the tuition charges keep rising. Why do they do this? Just because they can....
If you are paying for tuition for your kids, have recently, or are bailing out your adult children groaning under student loans, read this. It's a real eye opener about the greed and corruption in the system.
An "epiphany" article from Thomas Frank.....should be required reading for every student so they know the machine they are getting in to when they go off to college.
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Rodney Dangerfield in "Back to School"
The price of a year at college has increased by more than 1,200 percent over the last 30 years, far outpacing any other price the government tracks: food, housing, cars, gasoline, TVs, you name it. Tuition has increased at a rate double that of medical care, usually considered the most expensive of human necessities. It has outstripped any reasonable expectation people might have had for investments over the period. And, as we all know, it has crushed a generation of college grads with debt. Today, thanks to those enormous tuition prices, young Americans routinely start adult life with a burden unknown to any previous cohort and whose ruinous effects we can only guess at.
On the assumption that anyone in that generation still has a taste for irony, I offer the following quotation on the subject, drawn from one of the earliest news stories about the problem of soaring tuition. The newspaper was the Washington Post; the speaker was an assistant dean at a college that had just announced a tuition hike of 19 percent; and the question before him was how much farther tuition increases could go. “Maybe all of a sudden this bubble is going to burst,” he was quoted as saying. “How much will the public take?”
Oh, we would take quite a lot, as it happened. It was 1981 when the assistant dean worried in that manner—the very first year of what was once called the “tuition spiral,” when higher ed prices got the attention of the media by outpacing inflation by a factor of two or three. There was something shocking about this development; tuition hadn’t gone up like that during the 1970s, even though that was the heyday of ascending consumer prices.
Yet at that point, the tuition spiral had more than three decades to go—indeed, it is still twisting upward today. But the way we talk about this slow-motion disaster has changed little over the years. Ever since the spiral began, commentators have been marveling at how far it’s gone and wondering how much farther it has yet to run—“the trend can’t continue,” they say every few years. They ask when the families and politicians of America are finally going to get off their knees and do something about it.
2/ "People Are Awesome" is wonderful......a four minute clip of every kind of athlete doing extraordinary feats.....however when you watch this, you may be reminded of our Fails from TwisterNederland where things don't go so well, and pain ensues.
But enjoy this....very exciting, all good stuff and the music is cool too - "Levitate" by Hadouken....
3/ The excellent Frank Rich on Eric Cantor's loss of his seat, and Hillary's launch of her book tour. Always insightful.....
Every week, New York Magazine writer-at-large Frank Rich talks with contributor Eric Benson about the biggest stories in politics and culture. This week: the tea party offs Eric Cantor; what Cantor's loss means for immigration reform; and the rocky launch of candidate Hillary Clinton.
Eric Cantor, the Majority Leader of the House of Representatives, was ousted last night in his Republican party primary by an unknown economics professor named David Brat. Cantor's loss is one of the most shocking political upsets of recent years, not only because House leaders simply don't get ousted in primaries, but also because virtually no one in the national media seems to have considered the possibility that this could happen, much less predicted it. How the hell did Cantor lose? And what does this say about the state of the so-called GOP civil war? Cantor’s fall, and the fact that no one in the mainstream press saw it coming, is yet another indication that the biggest political story since Obama’s 2008 victory remains baffling to many. How many times can one say this? The radical right — whether it uses the tea party rubric or not — has seized control of one of America’s two major political parties. The repeated reports of the tea party’s demise are always premature. Back in the fall of 2012, in the weeks before Obama’s reelection, I wrote a piece titled “The Tea Party Will Win in the End” making this case and arguing that signs seemingly suggesting otherwise (the tea party dropping to a 25 percent approval rating in a September 2012 Wall Street Journal-NBC News poll; the demise of Michele Bachmann) were utterly misleading. After Todd Akin & Co. were routed that November, the tea party was dead again. When a fresh round of tea-party obituaries started appearing this spring — hey, Mitch McConnell won his primary, the Establishment is back! — they, too, should have been ignored. In terms of the big picture, McConnell’s victory — achieved only after he hired Rand Paul’s campaign manager and moved further to the right — was as politically meaningless as Mitt Romney’s ultimately winning the 2012 GOP nomination. The two thirds to three quarters of 2012 GOP voters who routinely supported the candidates to Mitt’s right in primary season were the true indicator of where the party is.
Brat is an Ayn Rand conservative.
4/ Cantor #2.....what really caused this shocking result? This story says it's the dark money machine of the Kochs and other billionaires, powered by right wing radio. We consistently underestimate the influence of the crazies on AM radio, but in many parts of the country there is no NPR, no progressive radio, just God, Guns and Limbaugh/Ingraham/Savage, the assholes angry white people listen to, and it wears them down and gets them crazy and full of hate.
And these "Republican Base voters" took out Cantor....
Unless you've been living under a rock for the past twenty-four hours, you know by now that Eric Cantor, the House Majority Leader, lost his primary election last night to a little-known college professor named David Brat.
This was a shocking upset, one that no one saw coming. So ever since news broke about Cantor's defeat at roughly around 8 P.M. last night, the Beltway media has been trying to get to the bottom of just why exactly someone like him, someone so well-connected and established, lost to someone like David Brat, who spent less on his campaign than Cantor spent on steaks.
The official narrative is that Cantor lost because he was too "moderate" (from a Republican point of view, at least) on immigration, that he didn't spend enough time in his district, and that the conservative base was sick and tired of someone it saw as a sellout.
And while there is a lot of truth to that narrative - just check out any right wing blog and you'll see what I mean - it misses the bigger picture of what's really going on here.
One of the reasons - if not the biggest reason - Eric Cantor lost was that he totally underestimated the dark money machine that was the real force behind David Brat's campaign.
The media is making it seem like Brat was some sort of underdog, but in reality, he's strapped to the hilt with billionaire support and billionaire money.
5/ The World Cup is on in Brazil, and I can detect a sigh from most of our readers, but whether you like football or not you will appreciate John Oliver's rant on how FIFA, the governing body of soccer, is a hopelessly incompetent and corrupt organization.....
Even though I know nothing about FIFA, this was fascinating and pretty funny too.....thirteen minutes......
And an update.....I just saw a story today saying Quatar's hosting the event in 2022 is now in doubt because of alleged bribery charges, i.e. Quatar bribed FIFA to get the World Cup......
John Oliver has for the second consecutive week issued a hilarious, brutal, and elucidatory rant about a galling but sometimes tedious issue. On last week’s episode of Oliver’s new HBO show Last Week Tonight, it was his brilliant takedown of the FCC’s newly proposed anti-net-neutrality rules that went viral. This week he digresses beautifully on the corruption, crassness, and general ugliness of soccer’s world governing body, FIFA.
“For American viewers who may never have encountered them, FIFA is a comically grotesque organization,” Oliver begins, before comparing the group to ancient Egyptian slave masters, unaccountable hegemonic global religions, and the makers of 2 Girls 1 Cup. Among the many FIFA sins Oliver lists are the human rights abuses of 2022 World Cup host country Qatar, various bribery scandals, its imposition on Brazil of a law legalizing beer sales at World Cup matches, white elephant World Cup stadiums, and its farcical self-description as a nonprofit organization with a billion dollars in the bank.
6/ A very funny commercial from Germany....one minute, and this is especially for the ladies.....
Guys will like most of it......
7/ Iraq is on the point of disintegration, and although the McCain's and the neocons say we need "boots on the ground" again, the reality is there's not a damned thing we the US can or should do about it. But as this story says ISIS, the Sunni faction, is much more ambitious than your normal guerilla group - they want to form a Sunni state from parts of Iraq AND Syria, with major oil fields included. Their success was only possible because Al Malaki, the President of Iraq we have thrown hundreds of billions of dollars at, has turned out to be a corrupt, domineering Shia asshole......
A good story with maps, so you can see the pattern....
The news: Terrorist group Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS), the world's richest terrorist group, now controls large portions of both Iraq and Syria. Even though al-Qaida ended formal association with the Islamic extremists in February, they've grown large enough to seize areas with particularly lucrative oil resources. By transporting and selling oil to and throughout their regime, ISIS is becoming even wealthier and expanding their power.
The faction's agenda includes money, armed forces, religion and, now increasingly, oil. And it's that last one that poses the largest threat in taking down the Syrian government and creating the proto state they want.
Aaron Zelin, an analyst with the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, recently discovered a 2006 map where ISIS projected their potential control.
Image Credit: Aaron Y. Zelin
To get a clearer understanding of the region, this current map illustrates where attacks have occurred and shows the controlled provinces in detail.
8/ Fukushima is still active, spilling radioactivity into the Pacific at an alarming rate, but when was the last time you heard it mentioned in the corporate media. Hmmm......Pacific tuna anyone?
The corporate media silence on Fukushima has been deafening even though the melted-down nuclear power plant’s seaborne radiation is now washing up on American beaches.
Ever more radioactive water continues to pour into the Pacific.
At least three extremely volatile fuel assemblies are stuck high in the air at Unit 4. Three years after the March 11, 2011, disaster, nobody knows exactly where the melted cores from Units 1, 2 and 3 might be.
Amid a dicey cleanup infiltrated by organized crime, still more massive radiation releases are a real possibility at any time.
Radioactive groundwater washing through the complex is enough of a problem that Fukushima Daiichi owner Tepco has just won approval for a highly controversial ice wall to be constructed around the crippled reactor site. No wall of this scale and type has ever been built, and this one might not be ready for two years. Widespread skepticism has erupted surrounding its potential impact on the stability of the site and on the huge amounts of energy necessary to sustain it. Critics also doubt it would effectively guard the site from flooding and worry it could cause even more damage should power fail.
Meanwhile, children nearby are dying. The rate of thyroid cancers among some 250,000 area young people is more than 40 times normal. According to health expert Joseph Mangano, more than 46 percent have precancerous nodules and cysts on their thyroids. This is “just the beginning” of a tragic epidemic, he warns.
There is, however, some good news—exactly the kind the nuclear power industry does not want broadcast.
9/ John Oliver has got into his stride, and this wonderful clip from two weeks ago about the FCC and "Net Neutrality" is an absolute classic - he asks for help from all of the internet trolls to make comments to the FCC, and because of this show the response broke the website.
It's also very funny indeed.....about 13 excellent minutes......
On Sunday night, Last Week Tonight’s John Oliver spent 13 solid minutes railing against the FCC’s new rules that could put an end to net neutrality. At the end of the segment, Oliver urged his viewers to take their complaints directly to the FCC through a new comment system the agency recently set up at fcc.gov/comments.
That URL appeared on screen behind Oliver for 40 whole seconds as he rallied the internet’s most notorious commenters to “focus your indiscriminate rage in a useful direction.” It looks like it worked.
For much of Monday, viewers who saw Oliver’s rant flocked to the FCC website comments section in such large numbers that they effectively crashed the site. This Reddit thread sums up the difficulties many people had just trying to get the page to load let alone successfully post a comment to it.
10/ A two minute clip of computer technology morphing celeb's faces from male to female, man to animal and back again, all quite quickly. Very clever and well made, but I actually found it a little disturbing, and I'm not sure why.
See what you think!
11/ Eat fast food? Lot's of packaged garbage? You are well on your way to liver disease, tied to obesity and Type 2 diabetes.....
I'll say it again - you have to look after your own health, because Big Food and the medical system are trying to make you sick. If you eat real food and are healthy, noone makes money.....
Nancy Borowick/The New York TimesYubelkis Matias, 19, a student at Bronx Community College, lives with fatty liver disease.
Despite major gains in fighting hepatitis C and other chronic liver conditions, public health officials are now faced with a growing epidemic of liver disease that is tightly linked to the obesity crisis.
In the past two decades, the prevalence of the disease, known as nonalcoholic fatty liver, has more than doubled in teenagers and adolescents, and climbed at a similar rate in adults. Studies based on federal surveys and diagnostic testing have found that it occurs in about 10 percent of children and at least 20 percent of adults in the United States, eclipsing the rate of any other chronic liver condition.
There are no drugs approved to treat the disease, and it is quickly becoming a leading cause of liver transplants around the country.
Doctors say that the disease, which causes the liver to swell with fat, is particularly striking because it is nearly identical to the liver damage that is seen in heavy drinkers. But in this case the damage is done not by alcohol, but by poor diet and excess weight.
“The equivalent of this is foie gras,” said Dr. Joel E. Lavine, the chief of pediatric gastroenterology, hepatology and nutrition at NewYork-Presbyterian Morgan Stanley Children’s Hospital. “You have to force feed ducks to get fatty liver, but people seem to be able to develop it on their own.”
Gavin Owenby, a 13-year-old in Hiawassee, Ga., learned he had the disease two years ago after developing crippling abdominal pain. “It’s like you’re being stabbed in your stomach with a knife,” he said.
An ultrasound revealed that Gavin’s liver was enlarged and filled with fat. “His doctor said it was one of the worst cases she had seen,” said Gavin’s mother, Michele Owenby. “We had no idea anything was going on other than his stomach pain.”
With no drugs to offer him, Gavin’s doctor warned that the only way to reverse his fatty liver was to exercise and change his diet. “They told me to stay away from sugar and eat more fruits and vegetables,” Gavin said. “But it’s hard.”
12/ Amazing one minute ad by Volkswagen.......set in a Hong Kong cinema, and there's a surprise ending....wow....one minute.
This should be mandatory viewing for all millenials and teenagers......
13/ The stock market downgraded Whole Food's stock when Walmart came out with the announcement they were going to offer organics....but as this article points out Whole Foods customers would rather slice off their pinkeys that be caught dead in a Walmart.....it's a class thing, dahling......
Any doubts? Go to "People Of Walmart"......
Joe Shlabotnik
In a hand-wringy piece, The Wall Street Journal wondered on Wednesday why Whole Foods’ stock had sunk 20 percent. Walmart’s decision last month to offer cheap organicsmight’ve played a role. As Wacko in Chief John Mackeyrecently told investors, “Competition is more intense right now than we’ve possibly ever experienced before.”
But is Whole Foods actually in trouble? As the WSJ admits, “[Whole Foods] is still trading at 25 times earnings.” And as Annie Gasparro notes, organic and natural food was a $48 billion industry in 2012 — eight times higher than in 1998.
Sure, the market’s dominated by conventional retailers, with 55 percent market share compared to the 38 percent raked in by specialty retailers like Whole Foods and Trader Joe’s, according to the WSJ. But the paper’s hyperventilation seems akin to worrying that McDonalds’ coffee drinks will put Starbucks out of business. You can buy coffee at both places, sure. One is even half as expensive. But some who roll through the Starbucks drive-thru for the classic green straw would never be caught dead at the Golden Arches.
Whole Foods doesn’t just sell organics; it sells an experience. You KNOW you’re gonna find dairy-free ice cream and kombucha samples and a hot lunch buffet with dangerously addictive country-fried tofu. It’s the grocery store version of a gated luxury community. I’m not an economist (I just play one on TV), but I’m betting classism will swaddle Whole Foods like a snuggly blanket.
14/ Lana Del Rey is an enigma, with a sultry voice and a moody look, but she really appeals to the young......this video of "Born To Die" has over 150 million hits. It's shot in a palace in Fontainebleau France, with two tigers at her feet, but cuts away to "another" Del Rey in an old car with a tattooed loser.....
She was the subject of an article in the Times today.....here's an excerpt. The video is quite good, and listen to the lyrics - dark indeed.
Since her emergence on a major label with the single “Video Games” in 2011 and the album “Born to Die” in 2012, Ms. Del Rey has drawn passionately opposed responses. Her songs and video clips demurely step into cultural minefields, exploring eroticism, mortality, power, submission, glamour, faith, pop-culture iconography and the meaning(s) of the American dream. She has faced, in reviews and online discussions, shifting accusations of inauthenticity, amateurishness, anti-feminism and commercial calculation (although her only Top 10 single in the United States was unplanned: a dance remix by Cedric Gervais of her wistful ballad “Summertime Sadness”). But she has also, largely through YouTube, gathered an adoring worldwide audience that takes her every lyric to heart.
“Ultraviolence” will doubtless stir up more disputes. But one thing the album should immediately eliminate is the notion that Ms. Del Rey is only chasing hits. The album reaches deeper into her slow-motion sense of time, her blend of retro sophistication and seemingly guileless candor. It also moves gracefully between heartache and sly humor, sometimes within the same song.
15/ Charlie Crist wants to visit Cuba.....Carl Hiaasen explains that although it sounds good, it's a really bad idea.....
Charlie Crist wants to go to Cuba this summer, in the middle of his campaign to get elected governor of Florida again.
It would be a flaky thing to do, but that’s Charlie. He thinks the trip will win him votes.
His sunny optimism is based on polls showing that most Floridians want an end to the U.S. trade embargo and travel ban against Cuba. This trend is apparent even in Miami-Dade, where many younger Cuban Americans and non-Cuban Hispanics believe the embargo should be lifted.
Crist declared the same thing publicly in February at Versailles restaurant in Little Havana, a boldly chosen venue. It was a 180-degree swing from his position when he was governor, and also when he was running for the U.S. Senate.
A newly minted Democrat, Crist says it’s time for a new strategy toward Cuba. Of the embargo he recently said, “The definition of insanity is continuing to do the same thing over and over again and expect a different result. This policy has not worked.”
He’s actually talking about futility, not insanity, but we get the point. The embargo has been a costly, colossal failure, a propaganda gift to the very regime it was meant to topple. This is not what you call breaking news.
Todays rude little video - strip poker commercial! One minute.....
Todays Jewish joke
A bright, young, fresh-out-of-school auditor just joined the IRS, excited to begin tracking down high-powered tax evaders.
Anxious for his first high-powered audit, he was a bit dismayed when his assignment was to audit a Rabbi.
Looking over the books and taxes were pretty straight forward, and the Rabbi was clearly very frugal, so he thought he'd make his day interesting by having a little fun with the Rabbi.
"Rabbi," he said, "I noticed that you buy a lot of candles."
"Yes," answered the Rabbi.
"Well, Rabbi, what do you do with the candle drippings?" he asked.
"A good question," noted the Rabbi. "We actually save them up and when we have enough, we send them back to the candle maker. And every now and then, they send us a free box of candles."
"Oh," replied the auditor somewhat disappointed that his unusual question actually had a practical answer, so he thought he'd go on, in his obnoxious way...
"Rabbi, what about all these matzo purchases? What do you do with the crumbs from the matzo?"
"Ah, yes," replied the Rabbi calmly, "we actually collect up all the crumbs from the matzo and when we have enough, we send them in a box back to the manufacturer and every now and then, they send a box of matzo balls."
"Oh," replied the auditor, thinking hard now how to fluster the Rabbi. "Well, Rabbi," he went on, "what do you do with all the foreskins from the circumcisions?"
"Yes, here too, we do not waste," answered the Rabbi. "What we do is save up all the foreskins, and when we have enough we actually send them to the I.R.S."
"The I.R.S.?," questioned the auditor in disbelief.
"Ahh, yes," replied the Rabbi, " the I.R.S. " ...and about once a year, they send us a little prick like you."
Anxious for his first high-powered audit, he was a bit dismayed when his assignment was to audit a Rabbi.
Looking over the books and taxes were pretty straight forward, and the Rabbi was clearly very frugal, so he thought he'd make his day interesting by having a little fun with the Rabbi.
"Rabbi," he said, "I noticed that you buy a lot of candles."
"Yes," answered the Rabbi.
"Well, Rabbi, what do you do with the candle drippings?" he asked.
"A good question," noted the Rabbi. "We actually save them up and when we have enough, we send them back to the candle maker. And every now and then, they send us a free box of candles."
"Oh," replied the auditor somewhat disappointed that his unusual question actually had a practical answer, so he thought he'd go on, in his obnoxious way...
"Rabbi, what about all these matzo purchases? What do you do with the crumbs from the matzo?"
"Ah, yes," replied the Rabbi calmly, "we actually collect up all the crumbs from the matzo and when we have enough, we send them in a box back to the manufacturer and every now and then, they send a box of matzo balls."
"Oh," replied the auditor, thinking hard now how to fluster the Rabbi. "Well, Rabbi," he went on, "what do you do with all the foreskins from the circumcisions?"
"Yes, here too, we do not waste," answered the Rabbi. "What we do is save up all the foreskins, and when we have enough we actually send them to the I.R.S."
"The I.R.S.?," questioned the auditor in disbelief.
"Ahh, yes," replied the Rabbi, " the I.R.S. " ...and about once a year, they send us a little prick like you."
Todays home improvement joke
My wife, Julie, had been after me for several weeks to varnish the wooden seat on our toilet.
Finally, I got around to doing it while Julie was out. After finishing, I left to take care of another matter before she returned.
She came in and undressed to take a shower. Before getting in the shower, she sat on the toilet.
As she tried to stand up, she realized that the not-quite-dry epoxy paint had glued her to the toilet seat.
About that time, I got home and realized her predicament.
We both pushed and pulled without any success whatsoever.
Finally, in desperation, I undid the toilet seat bolts.
Julie wrapped a sheet around herself and I drove her to the hospital emergency room.
The ER Doctor got her into a position where he could study how to free her (Try to get a mental picture of this.).
Julie tried to lighten the embarrassment of it all by saying, "Well, Doctor, I'll bet you've never seen anything like this before."
The Doctor replied, "Actually, I've seen lots of them......
I just never saw one mounted and framed."
Todays blond joke
Last year I replaced all the windows in my house with that expensive
double-pane energy efficient kind, and today, I got a call from the
contractor who installed them.
double-pane energy efficient kind, and today, I got a call from the
contractor who installed them.
He was complaining that the work had
been completed a whole year ago and I still hadn't paid for them.
Hellloooo,............just because I'm a blond woman doesn't mean that I am
automatically stupid.
been completed a whole year ago and I still hadn't paid for them.
Hellloooo,............just because I'm a blond woman doesn't mean that I am
automatically stupid.
So, I told him just what his fast talking sales
guy had told me last year, that in ONE YEAR these windows would
pay for themselves!
guy had told me last year, that in ONE YEAR these windows would
pay for themselves!
Helllooooo? It's been a year! I told him.
There was only silence at the other end of the line, so I finally just hung up.
He never called back. I bet he felt like an idiot..
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