Category: Rants

Recently I was asked why a parent should pay to send a child to my current university when there are so many inexpensive degrees now available online. I repeated the standard, albeit completely honest, reaction among academics at traditional brick-and-mortar institutions: If you want to buy a degree, go to University of Phoenix. If you want an education, go to a real college.
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Online education excels at offering the cheapest, easiest route to a degree. But that's it. Cheap and easy are the positives. The downside is learning next to nothing. If you simply need a degree to get a promotion from G-8 to G-11 at the Department of Such-and-Such, then online courses are ideal for you. If you want to learn stuff, they're not. It has its place, but it's important to be realistic about what the process does and does not do well.

Back in 2007, Boeing was the subject of many glowing tributes among business journalists and other ooze-secreting MBA types for their revolutionary approach to building the 787 Dreamliner. After decades of the aircraft industry building and re-building the same basic designs in different sizes, the 787 was going to be an evolutionary leap. It would use plastics and carbon fiber in place of metal, electronics in place of hydraulics, and other weight/space saving technologies. Another novel aspect of its design was that Boeing was essentially going to crowdsource it and build it "efficiently" (i.e., on the cheap). It cut development costs with H-1B visas, cut production costs with outsourcing, and allowed its contractors to freely subcontract to further reduce costs. The 787 is truly the Plane Globalization Built.
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Rest assured that the numerous emergency landings and the worldwide grounding of the aircraft that have been delivered (several years late) is unrelated.
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Thankfully the internet's memory is as long as mine, and here you can enjoy an example of the kind of praise heaped on the company for the innovation of farming out the job of building the components of an exceptionally complex machine to – wait for it – over 900 contractors and subcontractors when all was said and done.

Boeing says 70% of the 787 has been outsourced; rival Airbus is relying on subcontractors for about 50% of its A350 plane, now in development. "This farming-out of the airplane's construction is revolutionary," says Richard Aboulafia, vice president at Teal Group, an aerospace consulting firm.

Revolutionary! Contracting was done with American, Korean, Japanese, French, Italian, German, and Australian companies among others, and each of these subcontracted the actual labor to the usual suspects – Eastern Europe, China, Mexico, South America, and the like.

Unfortunately Boeing is starting to realize that outsourcing and cheap labor are good at making really inexpensive disposable goods. Consumer electronics. Clothes. Shoes. Toys. It's not so good at making the most complex machines ever devised by mankind, which happen to have a very low tolerance for system failures. If your Reeboks fall apart or your Blu-Ray player craps out, you're probably going to be irritated. If the electrical subsystems on an aircraft stop working, you're probably going to be dead. Yes, aircraft like this have redundant systems and not every failure results in a catastrophe.
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But we're not talking about a new iPhone here, where the attitude in development can be, "Just release it and we'll shake out all the bugs in the first year."

The issues with this airplane should not be overblown, but they should not be interpreted solely as problems with one product from one company. This is an important example of the limited benefits of outsourcing and other "globalization" practices. As I've said many times before, it makes things cheaper. That's what it does. That's all it does. It does not make things better, safer, or even necessarily faster. It's merely a way to pay fewer people in high-wage countries as a means of maximizing profits. The idea that Boeing would assemble a bunch of components made by hundreds of different contractors into the most technologically advanced airliner in the world shows how little value is given to quality and safety in comparison to penny-pinching.

(January 16, 2033. A fire-lit cabin in the hills of Brezhnev City, Stalinton – formerly Boise, Idaho. A man sitting on a shattered milk crate looks older than his 53 years. His rumpled, malnourished grandson sits at his feet.)

"Grandpa? My friend Sergei says that this used to be the most powerful country in the world. Is that true? I thought it sounded silly."

Grandpa looked around cautiously. They are alone. "Actually, your friend is right, Vlad. It used to be called 'America'." His eyes glimmer briefly. "Now there's a word I haven't heard in ages."

"What does it mean?", the child asked.

"No one knows. Some say it's an Injun word meaning 'God's chosen people.'"

Vladimir is more confused than enlightened by this information. "Well if America was so powerful, what happened? Today one of the Petrov girls died during Orderly Socialist Playtime, and teacher said to be careful with her body because her parents might want to eat her. Why do moms and dads have to eat their own kids, Grandpa? Are you gonna eat me someday?"

"Heavens no!", Grandpa chuckled. Oh, the things kids say. Who was that man with the TV show about kids saying funny things? Now it's gonna drive me crazy, he thought. Colored fellow, with those delightful sweaters. Hmm. Oh, no matter. He gently chided himself for thinking of frivolous things. Think about something important, you old coot. Like where you're going to find enough turnips for daily meal tomorrow. Vladimir's ribs are showing, for god's sake.

Ah, God. Another flashback. How long since he was banished from these lands?

"I don't get it," the boy insisted. "This country doesn't seem powerful. What happened to it?"

Grandpa inhaled deeply. How much can a child understand? He isn't old enough. But if you don't tell him, old man, then who will?

He paused to consider his words. "Vladdie, a little more than 20 years ago, America was a wonderful place, full of more people than you could ever imagine. And 53% of them were the best people who ever walked the Earth. But back then countries used to choose their leaders. Isn't that something? Imagine if you got to pick the Great People's Secretary! Well if people can pick their leaders, that means sometimes people will pick a bad one.
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And that's what happened."

Vladimir struggled to process this. "What was his name?"

Grandpa suddenly looked pained. "You already know his name, child. You say your Patriot's Loyalty Oath to his picture every morning.
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"

"You mean…Father Obama?"

The name sends shivers down his spine. Or maybe he is just cold. So cold.

"Back then we called him 'President' Obama." His face was taut with the tension of a man forced to recall an ex-wife or a particularly obstinate bowel movement. "We the People" – gosh, what a phrase! – "gave him power. And then he became a tyrant." The child looked confused again.
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"A tyrant is someone who takes all of the power for himself."

"Is…is Father Obama a 'Tyrant' then?"

"He is. He certainly is. That is why we must till the mung bean fields for him every day, dawn to dusk. That is why he took our cars and melted down the metal to make rings for gay weddings. That is why every year the child selected in the Lottery is fed to dogs at the Coliseum for his amusement."

Just then, the old man noticed that his fist was clenched tightly.

Vladimir paused, unsure if he should go on.
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Hesitantly, he said, "If he was bad, why didn't you pick a new one?"

"BECAUSE!", Grandpa roared. He even startled himself with the outburst. He forced himself to relax. The fire was getting low now. "Because he changed things so that we couldn't." He anticipated the next question. "We tried to stop him. Oh how we tried. We fought a war, a war that is not taught in your history class. Many people died. Millions, maybe. Your Uncle Vernon died in the Patriotic War, as did…" A long pause. "…as did your Grandma."

For a moment there was silence. "I suppose you want to know the rest of the story, sonny. That's OK. Don't be shy."

"I do, Grandpa. If there was a war, why did you…" He regretted the word choice. "…why did the people lose?"

It is not an easy question to answer, even though Grandpa and everyone else who remembered the War knows exactly why. Some memories are too painful to relive. It was like being hypnotized and having memories of one's own circumcision extracted from the subconscious and played out in vivid Technicolor.

"We lost," he began slowly, struggling to choke down the Slurpee of pain and anguish he was being forced to drink, "because our guns couldn't hold enough bullets." This, the boy seemed to understand. Certainly he was familiar with guns, what with the People's Security Police on every block. "Their guns could hold 30 bullets. Ours could not."

The fire was nearly extinguished now. The boy began to rise to find another chip of dried ox dung to burn. Suddenly, Grandpa continued. "Your Uncle Vern died not too far from here. I was with him when it happened. The Blackshirts were attacking our humble village and we were giving 'em all they could handle. They sent a flock of their trained Death Beagles after poor Vern. He was a great shot though. He picked 'em off, one by one. But then…then he pulled the trigger and nothing happened except a little 'click'. He had shot 15 of those evil monsters, child, but there were 15 more. First they gnawed out his eyes. Then, as they were trained to do to all heterosexuals, they bit off his genitals. He was still alive to watch those trained dogs remove and eat his intestines, occasionally pausing to attack the driver of a non-hybrid car. It was…the look in his eyes was something I will carry with me forever."

It was now completely dark. The daily Match Ration was gone; there was no way to restart the fire. "Grandpa? Would Uncle Vern be alive today if his gun held 30 bullets?"

"He would be. Yes he would be."

"Grandpa? Would…would America still be alive too?"

This was the deepest cut, like a cut that is so deep that you look at it and say, wow, that is way deep.

"Yes," he muttered, barely audible. Then they sat in silence looking at the extinguished fire, a subtle metaphor for the extinguished nation for which he grieved silently and always.

Like everything else, the economy and job market are subject to fads. Every few years there's some new job or field that we tell our children to study in college and for which politicians pretend we're going to re-train laid off auto workers. Every time I see one of those "10 Fastest Growing Careers!" stories I immediately flash to Dustin Hoffman being cornered at a party in The Graduate: "One word: Plastics!"

Whenever there appears to be a hint of demand in some field or industry, we are all encouraged to stampede toward it. It's like watching eight year olds play soccer, mindlessly (and fruitlessly) chasing the ball from one place to another. Just in my lifetime I've seen the ball bounce from business (especially MBA) programs to anything remotely related to computers to law schools to medical fields like nursing and pharmacy. If I had a nickel for every article or new segment on the nursing shortage in the last ten years I'd…be making money in a very strange manner. I'd also have a lot of nickels.

And now, lo and behold, it turns out that doubling the number of nursing students from a decade ago is producing more graduates than the job market will absorb. Sound familiar, law school grads? After a lifetime of parents, guidance counselors, and academic advisers telling you that it was a great idea, you reach the end of your education and find a saturated job market. Your primary achievement appears to be helping to create a buyer's labor market for corporate hospitals and their endless battles with nurses' unions.

As the linked article shows, nurses and nursing students are apparently turning to the same fallacy that has sustained academia for the past five or ten years: that there is a giant cohort of Baby Boomers all getting ready to retire and they're just hanging on right now until their 401(k)s turn around. They're always just about to start retiring. Next year! Or maybe like five years! But it's gonna be soon, we swear. The problem, of course, is that the stock market has largely recovered since 2008, and when these aging boomers do retire, employers will look to a job market choked with tens of thousands of desperate candidates and offer salary and benefits that look nothing like what the departing older workers got. In academia, this means replacing retired tenured faculty with temps, adjuncts, and other industry terms for "cheap labor". In nursing, this means more hospitals outsourcing nursing to staffing agencies and short-term contract employment, meaning that the reasons we were all told to stampede toward that field in the first place – a shortage of qualified workers, good salary/benefits, and job security – no longer exist.

I think that's called "bait and switch." Or maybe it's not a bug, but a feature of the exciting new Third Wave knowledge-and-services economy. We never know what The Market will want from one moment to the next, and when it changes course we all need to drop what we're doing, uncomplainingly give up the human capital and experience we've amassed in whatever field we've been in, and learn how to do whatever new thing seems to be in demand. This would be ludicrous enough on its face without the added bonus of doing all that and finding that you can't even get a job in the Hot New Field.

Very few experiences are as horrifying and frustrating as talking about poverty in a college classroom.
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I have found this to be true both at "affordable" state schools and an expensive private school. Regardless of what we tell ourselves about scholarship programs and need-based financial aid, almost no one in college comes from actual poverty. The environment is overwhelmingly populated by middle and upper middle class kids. Certainly some of them have had rougher lives than others, and not all of them come from wealth by any stretch of the imagination. They do, however, often have a hard time recognizing that their life experiences might not be universally applicable.

The best way I can describe it is this: college students, reflecting the habits they've picked up from parents, family, communities, and the media, talk about poor people like they are a different species. The way they approach and conceptualize the issue is either filled with pure disdain (from the right-wingers) or almost unbearable paternalism (from the liberals). Very, very few students that I have met show the kind of maturity it takes to see poverty as a social construct. They see the poor as this kind of lamentable animal that is too stupid to survive without our help.

One of the inevitable laws of public discourse in the U.S. is that when poverty is discussed, someone must point out that poor people often have expensive things. iPhones and "big screen TVs" are popular props for this talking point, as are cars, Nikes, and any item of clothing above oily rags or a barrel and suspenders. This is to reinforce the fact that poverty is a matter of individual choice and/or that it is self-inflicted.

I am never clear about what we are supposed to gain from this wisdom. You mean…people who are uneducated, and in many cases functionally or completely illiterate, don't make good financial choices? Well I'm just shocked. Yes, one of the problems with poverty is that people who are poor develop bad habits (which, it is never noted in fairness, a lot of people who are far from poor also have) like spending money immediately rather than saving it or purchasing things they want when they can't afford their basic needs first. Yeah? And? What's the solution?

Since collective solutions are off the docket – Hey, let's maybe educate children so they turn into adults with basic life skills, and maybe let's work toward a society that doesn't have a massive impoverished underclass! – the only solutions we can ever come up with are to give Victorian lectures to the poor about their moral failings or to make their decisions for them. That there are plenty of non-poor Americans who have the exact same problems managing their finances should be a hint that the poor really are no different than the rest of us as individuals.

Instead, no matter how good our intentions may be we almost inevitably talk about the poor like an infestation. The causes of poverty are not the problem that needs solving – the poor themselves are the problem, and our job as comfortable bourgeois people is to figure out what to do with them.

It's really quite horrifying to watch all of this unfold, but I don't hold it against young people when they express these attitudes. They're merely parroting what they've been hearing at home and on TV their entire lives.

Most of what passes for "conflict" in modern American politics is seriously corny at its best and perfunctory at its worst. Partisan squabbles in Congress are not like a boxing match – the days of Brooks caning Sumner have long passed – but rather like pro wrestling: scripted, full of loud bluster and theatrical gestures, fake, and stupid. Supreme Court nominations are my favorite example. Everyone gets confirmed, but not before the minority party stages a few weeks of hearings to show the party base that, gosh, we tried to stop it.

In other words, despite all the complaints about rancor, partisan clashes, and incivility in Washington it's very rare that we actually see any of these people get angry. They act angry (or offended, or insulted, or whatever) at key moments because they know they are supposed to. "Obama nominated who? Without even consulting Mitch McConnell? Why I never!" We get lots of these, for lack of a better term, hissy fits. But it's so very rare to see these people pull out the knives and attack like a cornered animal. In my view there's only one thing that can reliably send Congress into a real, legitimate, out-for-blood frenzy, and that's any threat, real or perceived, to the Department of Defense budget.

Seriously, I think that partisan conflict is little more than going through the motions for most political issues. Most members who have any legislative experience know exactly what is and is not possible to get passed in any given session. Just the hint of any cuts to – or anything but continued growth of, for that matter – the Pentagon budget tells you everything you need to know about who runs that town. Think the NRA is a powerful lobby? There are dozens members of Congress who will tell Wayne LaPierre to his face to go fuck himself. None but a handful will even mention reduced defense spending…despite the fact that polling shows many Americans believing that we spend too much. You know the statistics and I will not recount them here.

This is why you see the GOP crapping itself to oppose former GOP Senator Chuck Hagel's nomination for Defense Secretary. On the surface it seems ludicrous – "They hate Obama so much, they even complain when he nominates one of them!" – and the rhetoric surrounding it is the usual nonsense; something about how he wants to appease Iran. Yeah. OK. In reality the only problem is that Chuck Hagel, a man who voted for every increase in defense spending he ever saw as a Senator, is perceived to be less than 1000% in favor of an eternally expanding Pentagon budget. Why, he might even support some totally insignificant cuts to bloated, expensive, ridiculous weapon systems and programs!

In the real world, that makes some sense. Yes, 20% of the population is stupid enough to equate money with security ("If we spend less, we're less safe!") but in Washington that idea is goddamn heretical. That is why you see people like McCain and particularly the two Texans, Cruz and Cornyn, attacking Hagel with the kind of pure hatred usually reserved for members of al-Qaeda. The beast must be fed at all costs. It must continue to grow, and no one who has not sworn complete loyalty to it is acceptable.

If there is a They in this country, a single malevolent force that Really Runs Things and manipulates the entirety of the government and the public, it's the defense industry. They own the media (in NBC's case, literally), the think tanks, the Beltway pundit class, the state/local governments, and Congress.

Their reach is even deeper and broader than that of Wall Street, if that's conceivable. They live entirely off of the government and Congress has to appropriate money for them every year. Defense spending is a discretionary item. The industry can never afford to take its foot off the lobbying pedal, not even for a second. Eisenhower was right; they own the government to an extent disproportionate even to their considerable role in our economy.

How do they do it? The easiest answer is that they figured out many decades ago – early in the Cold War – how Congress works. Namely, the industry understands and employs the strategy of Universalism better than any other. It's a simple idea: one of the most effective ways to build a winning coalition to pass legislation in Congress is to distribute the benefits as broadly as possible. If you want Congress to vote on a ludicrously expensive fighter jet program, one way to get a ton of Congressmen on board is to build the engines in one district, the wings in another, the electronics in a third, the radar in a fourth…and so on. The defense industry is not bound by any geography, as the oil industry is to some extent.
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No, they have made goddamn sure that they have economic interests in as many different states and Congressional districts as possible. They're everywhere. And that's why they get what they want all the time.

The south is lousy with the footprints of the military-industrial complex, but so is California. So's Virginia. Maryland. New York. Missouri. Washington state. Hawaii. Arizona and New Mexico. Colorado. North Dakota. The Carolinas. Tennessee. Pick any spot on the map and the military bases and defense contractors won't be far away.

That's why the claws are coming out over Hagel. And Hagel isn't even a real threat; he's a 66 year old company-man Republican from Nebraska. But unless one's loyalty to shoveling more and more money into the arms industry is beyond any conceivable doubt, neither they nor the Congressmen they have bought can risk letting you near the levers of power. For decades people have called Social Security the third rail of American politics. Well, Social Security's under the knife while the Pentagon keeps growing. Which one is untouchable?

Being an Opinion Professional – pundit, columnist, bobblehead, what have you – is a lot like being a Federal judge or a left-handed starting pitcher with all of his elbow ligaments intact: it's essentially a lifetime appointment. Short of extreme circumstances (the journalistic equivalent of impeachment, a torn labrum, or pitching for Dusty Baker) there appears to be no way to actually lose the job.
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You can be wrong about absolutely everything, constantly move the goalposts, make things up out of whole cloth, and propose ideas that make no sense, are insane, or both.

Part of this stems from the dynamics of the industry. There is not much of an audience for incremental suggestions and the blandly reasonable. No one wants to be the New David Gergen (David Brooks aside). There is an incentive to Go Big, to be attention-getting without sounding like a complete lunatic. And even if you fail at the latter, there is still plenty of work to be had in the minor leagues (explicitly partisan blogs and magazines, etc.) Few people remember him, but the career of Westbrook Pegler is a great example of the career arc of the insane. From his perch on top of the world as the big gun in the Hearst empire in the 1930s, he wasn't fired until 1960 when he turned on Hearst himself.

Then he kicked around the low-end newspaper syndicates, and then to a job writing the John Birch Society newsletter until he grew too insane even for that outlet (explicit antisemitism and encouraging readers to murder RFK will do that). Despite being demonstrably batshit, it took four decades for someone to stop giving the guy an outlet for his dyspeptic ranting.

Perhaps not the freshest example. However, it helps us understand why it is nearly 2013 and Megan McArdle is still being paid by highly visible media outlets for her writing. This is the woman who once responded to a reader pointing out that her statistics are bunk with "It wasn't a statistic – it was a hypothetical," and somehow the entire media did not collectively laugh her into oblivion. So here we stand in the shadow of another tragedy and Megan – Newsweek's most recent hire, by the way – has vomited a 4000 word jumble of boilerplate quasi-libertarian nonsense on the none too prestigious pages of The Daily Beast. After concluding, shockingly, that there is nothing that government can do about mass shootings, she offers:

My guess is that we're going to get a law anyway, and my hope is that it will consist of small measures that might have some tiny actual effect, like restrictions on magazine capacity. I'd also like us to encourage people to gang rush shooters, rather than following their instincts to hide; if we drilled it into young people that the correct thing to do is for everyone to instantly run at the guy with the gun, these sorts of mass shootings would be less deadly, because even a guy with a very powerful weapon can be brought down by 8-12 unarmed bodies piling on him at once. Would it work? Would people do it? I have no idea; all I can say is that both these things would be more effective than banning rifles with pistol grips.

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This does not even rise to the intellectual level of a decent Facebook post, and here we find the author being paid for the right to expose a global audience to this sewage. This is what she came up with. This is her idea. This is the best she can do. I guess that fancy University of Chicago education didn't cover things that cheap public schools give students in first-year social science classes: collective action problems, free riding, or, I don't know, watching Tombstone long enough to get to the Kurt Russell-as-Wyatt Earp "Your friends might get me in a rush but not before I turn your head into a canoe" scene that explains for anyone old enough to form sentences why people neither take initiative nor act simultaneously in such situations.

So all we really need to do is overcome millions of years of evolution and man's basic instinct to survive, adopt the basic tactics of North Korean infantry during the Korean War, and assume that a gunman can't shoot people faster than they can (in unison) give him the bum rush.

If that holds, everything should be fine.
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This is the person they pay to comment on finance, economics, politics, and social issues. I'm not sure if Newsweek counts as a top-tier media outlet anymore, but if so, I can't imagine McMegan getting another job in the big leagues after this. She needs to accept her fate and take a job at National Review Online. She can share an office and psych meds with Charles Krauthammer. It's for the best.

I am sick of writing this post. I am sick of responding to this type of event. I am sick of revisiting this issue every three or four months. I am sick of accepting that there is nothing we can do.

There are so many different directions to go with this. I'm overwhelmed by choice.

I could point out the staggering banality and complete disingenuousness of the common refrain that it's "too soon" to talk about policy solutions or it "politicizes the tragedy" to point out how this keeps happening over and over again while we do nothing because gun fetishists argue that "gun control" doesn't work (as opposed to the status quo, which clearly works well).

I could focus on the fact that the entire pro-gun argument falls to tiny pieces when you take away its straw man version of the opposition: that gun control will not end violence and killing, therefore it is not worth pursuing. No one has any illusions that man's urge to do violence to his neighbors can be legislated away. No one argues that more "gun control" will end gun crime. I think most of us would appreciate less of it, though. Maybe a mass shooting every 9 months instead of every 3. That would be pretty cool.

I could point out how selfish, misguided, and delusional it is to think that your wants, disguised as your own selective interpretation of your rights under the 2nd Amendment, are more important than other people's right to not get shot in the fucking face while sitting in a movie theater or in a classroom.

I could go with the "responsible use" canard, as if the fact that you can use something responsibly is evidence that it should be legal. You know how to handle guns safely and properly? Me too. Here's a medal. Thousands and thousands of people can't. Therefore it might be in our interest to look more closely at what we make available to them.

I could vent endless, eye-curdling word rage over your new-found concern with "mental health", an important issue that you care about only as a red herring to distract everyone from your precious guns. So you believe that the government can't stop you from owning an AR-15, but it can somehow FORCE people to undergo psychological evaluation and then force them to accept treatment, including medication? That's a curious interpretation of state power. Oh, and "mandatory mental health screening" in schools has been tried in a few places and rejected for what it is – a thinly-veiled effort to distribute surveys written by pharmaceutical companies ("Do you feel sad sometimes?") to get as many kids on Prozac and Adderall as possible. Next.

I could note how staggeringly disturbed you are as an individual if your response is "Well if more people were armed, they could shoot back!" as though it is a solution that a sane person would prefer. Armed vigilantism runs into the insurmountable barrier of reality: the attacker is prepared, and you are not. He will shoot you before you have a chance to shoot back. You are not tightly coiled and ready to pounce like he is. And when the live bullets are flying, you will be too shit-scared to use your weapon effectively in all likelihood. Again, if your idea of a rational response is "Well, let's arm teachers!" you need some of the mental health care you so suddenly value. Badly.

I could point out how ridiculous it is to think school security is an answer unless we're going to turn schools into military bases with three layers of defensive perimeters. Someone prepared to die doesn't have much of a problem shooting his way past locked doors and secretaries.

No, I will let all of that go for the moment. Instead, here is a concrete proposal, of the kind that I often receive criticism for lacking.

No one's going to take away your precious guns, not even the ones that fire military rifle ammunition like the .223/5.56 NATO caliber semiautomatic rifle used in this shooting. I know how unpopular that idea would be, because you believe you need these things. Or you simply want them, and you believe that your wants are more important than other people getting shot in the head. Instead, how about this:

1. A nationwide ban on the sale of any rifle magazine larger than 15 rounds. Aside from your convenience (reloading less often at the range) or your Rambo fantasies, there is absolutely no reason you need a 30-round magazine. Yes, a spree shooter could simply carry twice as many 15 round magazines to make up for the lack of 30-round clips. But every time he stops to reload, precious seconds for police to respond are gained. Opportunities arise for your favorite imaginary person – the heroic bystander armed with a concealed weapon – to intervene. Additional seconds for potential victims to run away will be purchased. A chance for a teacher to bonk him over the head with a textbook might come up. Or if nothing else, the shooter will be unable to fire quite so many rounds quite so quickly. A life here or there will be saved. Maybe there will be 22 victims instead of 28. That sounds like a worthwhile tradeoff for your very minor inconvenience, no?

2. Grandfather anyone with an existing 20+ round magazine, but institute a national buy-back program, no questions asked, for any older models. $50 per mag, well in excess of the sale price (approx. $20-30 for basic magazines for most common civilian rifles) escalating to $100 for certain models that retail for higher prices.

3. Pair it with a national buy-back program for any semi-automatic or illegally converted fully automatic weapon. No questions asked. No proof of ownership needed. Just walk into a police station, hand it over, and get a check for $____. If you'd rather keep your weapons, fine.

4. A mandatory training course, including a basic psychological evaluation, for anyone who chooses to buy semiautomatic rifles. We make people pay for months of Driver's Ed before they can get in a car. You can take five classes before you're granted access to your toy. If you don't want to take the course, fine. Buy a different kind of firearm.

5. Mandatory life in prison for straw purchases. Right wingers seem to think that harsher penalties deter drug crime, right? So let's stop pussying around with moms who buy guns for their 18 year old kid because Billy can't pass background checks on his own.

There you go. The only real restriction this creates is that you can no longer buy new 30 round magazines. If you're that desperate for one you could probably buy a used (albeit pricey) one. What would any of this accomplish? Well, it might take 10% of the semi-auto guns out of circulation. It would rapidly diminish the number of 30-round mags available. It might do something to take this kind of tragedy, which no society can eliminate completely, and at least make it A) less common and B) less successful when an assailant does decide to go on a rampage. No one's takin' yer guns.

Now go ahead and argue that your right to purchase a brand new 30 round magazine, as opposed to a 15 round one or used model, is so fucking sacred that people should keep dying so that you can enjoy it. I think 48 hours have passed, so the time is right. Go for it.

As many of you are no doubt well aware, this tends to be a forum for relentless negativity in terms of politics.
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The reasons are many, none more important than the fact that small, incremental victories mean little to me in the context of the long, steady, thirty-plus year downward slide toward a lower standard of living that has defined post-1980 America. There are things to celebrate here and there, but there is no momentum behind the positives.
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All of the momentum is in the opposite direction; every year we get a little poorer, the schools get a little more defunded, the textbooks get a little more revisionist history and industry-sponsored "science", the corporations get a little more human in court, the jobs with benefits become a little rarer, the playing field gets a bit less level, and the feeling that things have changed for the worse in a very fundamental way nags a bit more insistently.

There has been a surprising (which is to say, nonzero) amount of coverage of Michigan's passage of a "Right to Work" law earlier this week. Given that Michigan is a traditionally union-heavy northern state and RTW laws tend to proliferate in cesspits like Mississippi and Oklahoma, the media have responded predictably with feigned shock and plenty of What This Means commentary letting us know that Reasonable People now recognize that unionization is a thing of the past. It's all part of our great evolution into a completely postindustrial economy, and now we can look back on pensions, decent wages, and benefits with the same nostalgia we currently reserve for railroads and the Victrola.

This happens the same way "austerity" has happened and will continue to happen: in a slow, steady process of downwardly revised expectations, stern lectures about your moral failings (Live within your means!
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Work harder! Shop more!), and Tough Choices that screw you continuously but incrementally. Michigan voters elect the kind of people who will pass RTW legislation for the same reason that we've been shooting ourselves in the foot for decades now – the combined illusion and lie that if we make just one more sacrifice that lowers our standard of living while allowing the already wealthy to amass even more money, things will turn around for the rest of us. Just give up defined benefit pensions for the stock market roulette of 401(k) plans. Give up health insurance for Health Savings Accounts (or, you know, nothing). Accept some wage cuts to be more competitive with workers in Possum Junction, Alabama. Accept a few more to be competitive with workers in Mexico. Give up a few more of your rights to save the company money.
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Deregulate a few more industries – sure, some people will probably get sick or die, but we have to think about ways to cut overhead and be More Competitive.

Like any good con, it's always the next sacrifice that will be the one that does it, the magic bullet that finally solves the problem. And then when it doesn't, there will be just one more next year, and then maybe another one a few years from now, and then…ten or twenty years pass and we don't even remember what it was we were promised when we starting cutting flesh, and we're reduced to hoping that the next sacrifice will be enough to keep us from losing the house.

The first bite from the apple took place under Reagan, when we collectively agreed that the problem with the American economy is that rich people aren't rich enough; it has been all downhill from there. Now Congress is poised to take the first bite from another apple – the "entitlement reform" that will begin the process of eroding our ability to retire from our jobs that barely paid the bills for 40 years. Sure, just take a chunk out of Social Security and Medicare and then we'll be safe from the Fiscal Cliff and all other similar boogeymen. Then in 2016 there will be another Big Crisis demanding further cuts, as it turns out that those cuts that promised to Save Medicare did not work out as the Oracle had promised. Since we'll already have normalized the idea of sacrificing parts of SS and Medicare, the downward trajectory will already be mapped out and heavily greased. You don't need a time machine to recognize where this is headed once the cuts begin.

It's always "just one more." One more round of cuts. One more bout of austerity. One more tax cut for the rich. One more voluntary surrender of your rights. Like a gambler in over his head who believes that the next hand will bring salvation, we are all too eager to accept the argument that economic turnaround is so close that we can reach it with just one more big collective sacrifice by (98% of) all Americans. And then, lo and behold, it turns out that we did not sacrifice a large enough animal to appease God Market. Again.

It's difficult to get excited about taking a step forward when doing so is inevitably followed by three in reverse.

I couldn't comment on the career arc of Tom Cruise even if I wanted to – which is to say, even if doing so would not be an insipid waste of time – because as a rule I do not pay to see his movies. It is a personal boycott. Yes, I've seen bits of A Few Good Men because it is on cable basic every Saturday afternoon (apparently by law) and my dad took me to see Top Gun when I was six. In practice, however, Mr. Cruise's relentless public anti-psychiatry campaigning has earned him a place on my personal shitlist. I realize that he does not care. But like the anti-vaccine pinheads toiling away at the University of Google, this position does not merely make Mr. Cruise wrong. It also makes him dangerous. There are real people with real mental illnesses who are able to function thanks to the intervention of pharmaceuticals and psychiatry, and many more people who could benefit from doing so.

I mention this not to beat Mr. Cruise and his fellow cultists like the sad pinata of pseudoscience that they are. The point is that while I am many questionable things, I am not anti-psychiatry or -medicine. Re-read that sentence – multiple times if necessary – before you rush to the comments.

This must be good, right?

As a young faculty member there is both great value and great risk in listening to the Elders of academia. Much of their wisdom is invaluable; much of their complaining represents an unwillingness to change and/or a generational gap they are incapable of bridging. So it was with great hesitation that I engaged several older colleagues – not at my current university – bemoaning the over-medication and general over-diagnosing of the modern crop of undergraduates. The more they talked about it, the more I felt that there was a kernel of truth in it. Even the eight short years I have been teaching have been an eye-opening experience in this regard.

On the one hand this is an argument that should be treated with skepticism. An older person saying "We didn't have no 'ADHD' back in my day!" is foolish on the level of listening to old WWII veterans talking about how they didn't have PTSD back then. Of course they had it, they just didn't have a name for it. The treatment was alcohol, self-administered. Lots of problems exist long before medicine figures out how to diagnose and categorize them – postpartum depression, concussions, autism, and so on.

Once we reject that argument on its face and accept that the whole gamut of things we accommodate in the field of education – learning disabilities, developmental disorders, anxiety/depression, ADHD/ADD, and so on – are real, the question becomes more complex. We stop asking whether these things are real and start wondering how it is that suddenly every student in the educational system has them.

That is hyperbole, of course. But every year a larger percentage of the students I deal with, as is the case with other faculty as well, have various learning disabilities assigned to them. Often the student does not even have any idea what his or her disability is supposed to be; they know only that ever since they were in kindergarten, their parents and school administrators have been telling them that they are learning disabled. In the past ten years, conservative measurements show that the diagnosis of learning disabilities under the IDEA legislation has increased 40%.

Estimates vary widely, but something on the order of 15 to 20 percent of college undergraduates today are diagnosed with ADHD, and more than half (!!!) are taking Adderall or Ritalin without prescriptions either for fun or as a study aid. In graduate school and in my career I've met numerous academics who had legitimate addictions to these medications, and to a person they all stated that getting them legally from a doctor is as easy as walking into the office and saying "I have trouble focusing sometimes." Thirty seconds later they left with a prescription for amphetamines. (Check out this panel op-ed discussion of ADHD/prescription issues in education from the NY Times for more).

Of course you already know some of these statistics, just like you know that antidepressants, anxiety drugs, painkillers, and every other kind of medication on the planet is wildly over-prescribed in this country. But sometimes I stand in class and wonder that when we consider the recreational drug users (not a rarity in college, of course) with the students given pharmaceuticals by a doctor, are there any students left who aren't chemically altered by the time they get to me?

To hear the older faculty argue that back in the day, none of these things existed and somehow students managed to get through college anyway is misleading at best. Of course there were students with undiagnosed issues who never even made it to college or who failed because they couldn't study, couldn't focus, or couldn't do what was asked of them without some kind of necessary assistance. Despite that, I must admit that I wonder about the ratio of legitimate diagnoses to actual diagnoses in the student population. Doctors (especially the kind that gravitate to campus "health centers" and whatnot) will give pretty much anyone Adderall these days, but how many of those same students actually have ADHD? How many 18 year olds with diagnosed learning disabilities are simply reacting to the system (and Mom & Dad) telling them for the past ten years that they are disabled?

I have no answers to any of these questions. It's merely a set of observations. Despite all of these medical conditions being quite real and quite legitimate, I do not necessarily think my older colleagues insane quack-medicine theorists for questioning the rapid and substantial increase in the number of students so labeled in recent years. Those of you who have school- or college-aged children (or who are college-aged) are of particular interest to me here; what is your take on this? Is it the new moral panic – Druuuugs! Everyone's on druuuuuugs! Think of the childrennnn! – or is this a question we should spend any time thinking about?