New Voting Laws Achieve Same Purpose As Old, Chaplain Fired Over American Sniper Sermon, Science Denier $$$ Traced (DFB Needs Some Higher Education)

Happy Birthday, Gabriel García Márquez:  The Beloved Author’s Unlikely Beginnings as a Writer

New Voting Laws Ensure That the Struggle Continues

Christian Chaplain Fired for Preaching Compassion and Love Over Violence of American Sniper:   WWJD?

Have you heard about the importance, er, evidence, much-touted by so-called conservatives, of education (higher education, that is) providing the cure for the job drout?

No?

You've not been reading your David F. Brooks lately, have you?

Not to mention your Peter Greene reviews of its obvious idiocy.

. . . it’s not clear whether capitalism is broken or not because we are currently tangled up in some sort of twisted fun-house mirror version of faux capitalism where the free market has been obliterated by a controlled money-sucking machine run by the government on behalf of the oligarchs. I’m actually a fan of capitalism, but what we currently have in this country is not capitalism at all.

Second, your argument about the “temporary evidence” of the recession is invalid because the recession was (and is) not the result of some mysterious serious of natural events. The economy went in the tank because the CEOs and Wall Street put it there. The economy broke because the “capitalists” broke it, and consequently the recession itself is Exhibit A in the case against modern faux capitalism and the greedheads who run it.

Throwing all this back at a magical belief in education is simply another way to blame poor people for being poor. So sorry you need food stamps and health care, but if you’d had the guts and character to go to college and get a degree, you wouldn’t be in such a mess. Your poverty is just the direct result of your lack of character and quality. Well, that and your terrible teachers. But it certainly has nothing to do with how the country is being run. It’s all on you, lousy poor person. And also your teachers.

More Peter Greene perhaps?

Don't choke as it's mostly DFB and his thought managers running amuck (and you know how much fun that always is for readers of the "New York Times").

Mostly Brooks wants to argue for education as the miracle engine of economic justice. And to make his argument, he trots out the work of Raj Chetty, a piece of research that proves conclusively that even researchers at Harvard can become confused about the difference between correlation and causation. (Chetty, for those of you unfamiliar with the “research,” asserts that a good teacher will result in greater lifetime earnings for students. What he actually proves is that people who tend to do well on standardized tests tend to grow up to be wealthier, an unexciting demonstration of correlation best explained by things we already know – people who score well on standardized tests tend to be from a higher-income background, and people who grow up to be high-income tend to come from a high-income background.)

Brooks also cites magical researcher David Autor of MIT, who believes that if everyone graduated from college with a degree, everyone would make more money because, reasons. Because if everyone had a college degree, flipping burgers would pay more? Because if everyone had a college degree, corporations would suddenly want to hire more people? The continued belief in the astonishing notion that a more educated workforce causes higher-paying jobs to appear from somewhere is big news to a huge number of twenty-somethings who are busy trying to scrape together a living in areas other than the ones they prepared for these days.

Yes, Let's Follow The (Science Denier) Money

The Wind Comes Sweeping Down The Plaintiffs

US-NATO Preparing for War Against Russia:  Holding Largest Arctic War Games in Decade; Training and Arming Georgia, Moldova, Ukraine

Just kidding about that last one!