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“Just imagine you worked at the GAP. You’re $70 trillion behind in your register and then you start a war with Banana Republic because you say they got toxic tank tops over there.

You have the war, people are dying - a thousand GAP employees are dead. That’s right - bleeding all over the khakis. You finally take over Banana Republic and you find out they never made tank tops in the first place.”

In his opening monologue for the Oscars no less.

Via Libertarian Jackass.

If you’re interested in dividend stock news, a close friend recently started a blog that is continuously updated throughout the day. Visit: Dividend Stock News. It’d be nice to have some greenbacks to actually do some investing…

Governors Work to Improve H.S. Education:

“America’s high schools are obsolete,” Gates said. “By obsolete, I don’t just mean that they’re broken, flawed or underfunded, though a case could be made for every one of those points. By obsolete, I mean our high schools - even when they’re working as designed - cannot teach all our students what they need to know today.”

Two pragmatic solutions:
- a separation of School and State
- the Montessori method

Additional Deschooling Musings.

In one course I am currently taking, Personnel Management, we are required to read two peer-reviewed papers each week. Upon completion we then submit a critique along with questions to a group of students who discuss them with the rest of us the next session. One paper that sticks out is Seijts, Latham, Tasa, and Latham (2004) whom conducted a study of business school students in their senior year with a mean age of 20.7. Upon being split up into three groups (not important) these students play a computer game of sorts, wherein they become CEO of a cell phone company for 13 years. The first eight years were predetermined to correspond to historic regional coverage and then the remaining five years expanded to nationwide via industry deregulation – all of which was warned of to the participants by way of computer messages. Performance was measured based upon market share and each student was given course credit for completing the experiment.

My main contention, which I still stand by, is that this is set entirely outside the real world. Telecom CEO’s do not sit at a computer terminal all day receiving standardized messages from a central entity about industry changes that will occur in the future. Furthermore, none of the students had to live with any of the consequences their actions caused. They did not have to worry about accounts payable, research and development, advertising, marketing information systems, State regulations, and a cornucopia of issues – ranging from the most trivial and mundane (like notary headers) to bigger bites, such as solvency. Nor did they have to go home at the end of the day and explain to their friends and families as to how their decisions may have bankrupted a company.

While this was a research project that can in fact be replicated over and over, the conclusions gleaned from the study cannot realistically be transferred to generalizing telecom CEO behavior and the real world. If you want to know how a CEO would have reacted with factors XYZ, observe how a CEO handles factors XYZ. Studying twenty-one year-old college students whom have little to lose is not an accurate measurement of CEO activity.

One criticism leveled at instruction methods of business schools, such as the case-study, is from Pfeffer and Fong (2002):

Some schools lecture, others teach by the case method, some use a combination. But in relatively few instances in established business schools is there much clinical training or learning by doing–experiential learning where “concrete experience is the basis for observation and reflection” (Kolb, 1976: 21). Students learn to talk about business, but it is not clear they learn business. “Unfortunately you cannot replicate true managing in the classroom. The case study is a case in point: Students with little or no management experience are presented with 20 pages on a company they do not know and told to pronounce on its strategy the next day” (Mintzberg & Lampel, 2001: 244). As Bailey and Ford argued, although a scientific approach may be useful for the study of management, it is not at all clear that it helps in teaching management: “The practice of management is best taught as a craft, rich in lessons derived from experience and oriented toward taking and responding to action” (1996: 9). But as Leavitt noted, “business schools have been designed without practice fields” (1989: 40). (emphasis added)

In a nutshell, Pfeffer and Fong found after analyzing 40 years worth of research, that MBA graduates earned little, if any, more income compared to non-MBA’s. In fact, they found several instances of just the opposite.

Gary North suggests (and rightly so) that higher education – and MBA school in particular - has become nothing more than a bureaucratized Mandarin Civil Service of yesteryear, which adds little to no value of those who matriculate to them.

To end, one analogy between insulated schooling and real world performance comes in the way of the military. Ordained By the State: A Recipe for Failure:

I had problems understanding why a 23-year-old Lieutenant with an Animal Husbandry degree from Clemson University, and less than 7 months in the Army, was more qualified to lead men into combat than a 40-something sergeant with a 10th grade education and several years of combat experience in WWII, Korea, and Vietnam.
[…]
Qualified mid-level Non-Commissioned Officers (sergeants), many with more than a decade in the Army, were leaving in droves because of the debacle that was Vietnam. No one with the State had yet thought of the back door draft called stop-loss. To counter this loss of personnel, the Army/State designed what to them was the perfect solution. They would take a new recruit/draftee who had scored high on his Armed Forces Qualifying Test (AFQT) and place him in a Non-Commissioned Officers Course. After 22 weeks of schooling, the candidate would graduate as an E-5, while the top 5% were made E-6’s. They were immediately sent to Vietnam and placed in the position of Platoon Sergeant over soldiers of lower rank, many of whom had more time in combat than these “instants” had in the Army! The resentment was immediate: not exactly healthy or conducive to success in a combat unit!

While the military is an example of pure socialism at work, the labor pool in many regions of the world dichotomously moves based upon profit-loss market forces. To the chagrin of business school administrators everywhere, simply having a certificate of completion does not qualify you in any form or fashion to manage or direct the operations within a firm: bonified experience does. Experience that cannot be replaced with a textbook of definitions, powerpoint slides or computer simulations.

We have installed a new comment spam plug-in to try to thwart the mucho crap Tim gets. Though we tested it as best we can, there can still bugs that could stop comment posting. If that happens, please email me with the comment you tried to post and when you tried at mike AT antiwar dot com. Thanks!

“Those who can, do - those who can’t, teach.” - H. L. Mencken

I am a physical education teacher, which is how I pay some of the bills each and every month. Bills, that a friend of mine - Uncle Sharky - pointed out, were actually largesse. Several months ago, I told him that I was poor, indebted and did not live a life of luxury. Retorting back, he mentioned something to the effect: “Ahh, but you goto college, which is an expensive lifestyle.”

Oddly enough, I have been doing quite a bit of self-reflection as to the opportunity costs associated with my decision to pursue graduate school or college in the first place. While we are on the subject, sometime later we should practice the mental exercise of removing the entire institution of formal education from the assumptions list.

To be fair, I believe it is difficult to compare today’s Van Wilder University with the “classical” schools of Oxford or Cambridge. Nevertheless, for the school year: 2004-2005, the average tuition, fees, room and board of attending a four-year public institution: $11,354. For a four-year private institution: $27,516 (CollegeBoard).

One of the justifications for the price tag is that, in the long run, a college-educated individual would make more money than someone without said education. And since being more wealthy is A Good Thing™, efforts promoting this lifestyle should be carried out. As Neal Zupancic (a bartender!) points out, Senator Claiborne Pell legislated such an endeavor in 1972 - under the inauspicious name, a Pell Grant.

This line of reasoning strikes the French Paradox within me. The FP is the belief that essentially, drinking a glass or two of red wine throughout the day will promote healthy cardiovascular activity - in effect, you will live longer if you drink some bubbly on a regular basis. The argument in effect is, you will live longer if you drink wine. However, this is a non sequitur as the causal relationship is not directly connected.

For instance, could it also be possible that older individuals have accumulated more wealth and that some have been known to not only have an appetite for the vivacious beverage, but also: good medical care? This is similar to the classic story:

Ice cream consumption increases during the summer as does crime; therefore ice cream causes crime.

Simply substitute wine consumption and old age or college education and wealth generation for ice cream and crime.

This is not to say that there is not some chemical compound in wine (i.e. resveratrol) or alcoholic beverages that does in fact, promote a healthier cardiac system. Nor does it mean that having a college education will result in poverty. It is about a direct causal correlation.

One fallacious example found in economic policy is that of “minimum wages.” One of the arguments behind these laws is that a wage earner “deserves” at least a certain, bare minimum wage. Thus ignoring the productivity element in the equation altogether - that the reason someone earns a certain wage can be tied to their productivity within a firm. Why stop at $5.25 and not $10 or $100 per hour? We could all be rich overnight!

Value by fiat

The central underlying element to Senator Pell’s reasoning was skewed: those with college educations earned more money not because of the framed stamped and signed parchments hanging on the Living Room wall, but because they had some kind of intellectual training that gave them a competitive and productive edge over their non-educated brethren. And for the better part of 30 years, this “go to college and become rich” mentality has been unfortunately, successfully trained into the minds of several generations of not just boobus Americanus, but much of the developing and industrialized world.

Arguments regarding sub-standard educations aside, the fiscal outlook of those involved in following the accredited institution route has been documented and demonstrated to be not so bueno, notes Christopher Westley. Not that these individuals are unsuccessful upon graduation, but that they become broke, indebted and even bankrupt — all in the pursuit of El Dorado.

A fitting end to this discussion comes in the form of The Onion, whom has a superb spin on this topic, University Implicated in Check-for-Degree Scheme:

“We have strong evidence that the University of Michigan granted academic degrees to students in exchange for hefty payments, often totaling tens of thousands of dollars,” Deputy Attorney General James B. Comey said. “In the process, thousands of graduates have emerged with degrees, but few or no skills applicable to everyday life. And many are as unprepared to enter the job market as they were when they first enrolled.”

Food for thought:
- Athletics and Education: The Union of Athletics With Educational Institutions - if you attend a Division I or II school, odds are you are subsidizing ’student-athletes’ [a misnomer] and “professional sports” through your tuition and fee charges. Just to make matters worse… right?

- Straight Talk About College Costs And Prices - commission on rising costs of tuition and the breakdown of costs.

- Edumacation: We Don’t Want None - apparently you paid for someone to get a bogus degree from a bogus institution.

If you are interested in either some sort of web development solutions (e.g. e-commerce, web hosting, blog maintenance, web design, etc.) I highly recommend the following individuals:

- Mike Ewens
- David Veksler
- Jeremy Sapienza

I can attest first hand to their talents, abilities and proficiency at timely task completion. And the fact that they would probably bail me out of jail, at least once.

“I can picture in my mind a world without war, a world without hate. And I can picture us attacking that world, because they’d never expect it. ” - Jack Handey

This reminds me of Episode 163 in The Simpsons where a medically doped up Mr. Burns turns Springfield into an episode of the X-Files:

Burns: “I bring you… love.”
Lenny: “It brings love, don’t let it get away!”
Carl: “Break it’s legs so it won’t get away!”

More Handey quotes (get it?).

Tim’s site will be down for a brief time while we upgrade it. Readers may experience withdrawl. Talk amongst yourselves.

~ Mike Ewens

UPDATE (5 minutes later)…there were some errors, but all seems well. If you find anything wrong with the site, drop me an email at mike AT antiwar com

UPDATE (a bit later) Ok, comments are broken. Don’t know why. Working on it. All fixed: the default Blacklist is crap. All is well. Enjoy!

Homer Simpson: Not a bear in sight. The Bear Patrol must be working like a charm.
Lisa Simpson: That’s specious reasoning, Dad.
Homer: Thank you, dear.
Lisa: By your logic I could claim that this rock keeps tigers away.
Homer: Oh, how does it work?
Lisa: It doesn’t work.
Homer: Uh-huh.
Lisa: It’s just a stupid rock.
Homer: Uh-huh.
Lisa: But I don’t see any tigers around, do you?
[Homer thinks of this, then pulls out some money]
Homer: Lisa, I want to buy your rock.
[Lisa refuses at first, then takes the exchange]

Funny as it may be (and it certainly is) I know someone who used this Homerism in defense of State-funded police agencies, Aint That a Kick in the Head:

There would be more muggings if the police did not exist, and that doesn’t necessarily mean that they are the most efficient protection service either. Clearly, this is a case of missing what is Unseen, for Callahan doesn’t notice the times that someone doesn’t rob him because of the influence of the State.

My response to that was,

Au contraire my fine Austrian friend. This should not and is not an empirical argument (for instance, using your logic someone could justify the creation of an anti-asteroid agency. No asteroids? Thank the Dept of Anti-Asteroids, because without it there would be more asteroid attacks). It is impossible to know what the market would create in the absence of tax funded “enforcers” so suggesting that there would be more crime is invalid (unless you have a magic ball).

Ironically, Gene can see who is robbing him: the State — taxation is no different than being robbed. Furthermore, the “police” are funded through confiscatory means: they force you to pay them so they can prevent Ugzug from forcing you to pay him.

Lately, a number of friends have been curious to know why I have not been posting much on this blog. The truth was exposed this morning: I have been covertly running another blog — the dos equis variety with a permissive pink background, an obligatory blonde headshot and scandalous pillow talk.

Ack, where to begin disspelling that.

Even though our androgynous amigo was the new kid on the block, I felt compelled to post a comment to its view on a breast implant tax. I showed Jeremy Sapienza the post and he laughed; he then suggested that the author was just trying to yank our chains.

Then I delinked Pat after the wetdream. Then I justified my delinkage.

Then it turns out that the chick is a dude… with feelings and I’d like to discuss a couple passages that Scruffy makes:

Libertarians tend to be ugly because it’s an anti-majority philosophy. People who are attractive have an easy time going through life and derive far too many advantages from the status quo to ever question it. It’s only outsiders, who are usually ugly, who join up with fringe movements.

This summer at Mises U, I mentioned to a couple people that I wanted to eventually write an article discussing why hygiene and physical appearance were low on the priority list of most libertarians. Despite the incredible intellectual energies devoted to tackling weighty issues in detail (i.e. I believe Murray Rothbard alone authored at least 4 published papers discussing various methods of abolishing the Fed and reverting to a gold standard), it is unlikely that there will be an aesthetic dynamism equivalent in the form of a highly-competitive nationwide beauty pageant filled with wanna-be plastic libertarian centerfolds. Furthermore, I doubt we will be seeing a rigorous proof of the Photogenic Axiom from Hoppe et al.

Is this bad? To me this is a personal judgment call, so it really does not matter what I think (I’m not an Objectivist). Secondly, individuals like Rothbard specialized in political and economic theory, not exercise physiology. That is what the division of labor brings to the table. At the same time, I personally believe that it is beneficial to live and lead a balanced life (i.e. geeks, spend a little less time on forums and more time in the gym).

As far as ugliness being linked to an “anti-majority” philosophy, is this supposed to mean that the majority of people want to be seen as beautiful busty babes and brawny beaus? Or that they already are?

[Note: I am a kinesiology instructor at A&M and teach several sections of strength training. If anyone would like a specific workout, diet, or critique thereof, feel free to ask.]

Another point Houdini made was regarding the seemingly exponential success of the LG blog:

This effect no doubt carries over into the real world. Whenever I see an attractive woman with a successful career, I’ll remember the experience of this blog and assume that she didn’t really get there on merit, just her looks.

I really do not think this is a valid conclusion. Were Carly Fiorina or Meg Whitman made CEOs because the Board of Directors voted on their looks? What about an unattractive woman with a successful career? Or an attractive woman without a successful career? Did they forget to sleep with the night-time janitors? Are all the executives at Mary Kay lesbians? Ad nauseam.

A priori this point is moot: attractiveness is entirely subjective — beauty is in the eye of… and all that jazz (I would be an awful Objectivist).

I do not think there is anything morally or ethically wrong with wanting and striving to look better. I recall a speech from Don Boudreaux, “Cleansed by Capitalism” in which he discussed just how filthy people and living conditions were prior to the industrial development of the West — inexpensive cosmetic goods & services are readily available today right now, what is your medieval excuse for not using them? While I am not advocating that you (John “I’ve-read-every-book-by-Mises-and-Rand-but-I-smell-like-tuna” Libertarian) become a personal trainer, I would for the sake of First Impression and health, hit the fitness club a couple times a week or eat at Subway (despite what players of Counter Strike contend, eating French fries and drinking alcohol don’t hit “the right spot”). Nor am I advocating that you become a metrosexual, highlights and all…

Regarding mail-order brides, while I have no experience with them, why not start a mail-order groom service? And, how on earth did Wazoo discover that picture in the first place? Go-go-gadget Libertarian-Bride?

Lastly, whomever the author of LG is, props to you for doing what I should have (even if you’re a damn statist).

In less than a day I got pounded by 200+ spam comments. Not sexy or flattering.

If you want to declare something or comment on a post email me at:

tswanson - at - gmail dot com

Which H. L. Mencken quote has more bite?

- “The danger in free speech does not lie in the menace of ideas, but in the menace of emotions. If words were merely logical devices no one would fear them. But when they impinge upon a moron they set off his hormones, and so they are justifyably feared. Complete free speech, under democracy, is possible only in a foreign language. Perhaps that is what we shall come to in the end. Anyone will be free to say what he pleases in Latin, but everything in English will be censored by prudent job holders.” — Baltimore Evening Sun, Nov. 18, 1929

- “[T]he great majority of American colleges are so incompetent and vicious that, in any really civilized country, they would be closed by the police . . . In the typical American state they are staffed by quacks and hag-ridden by fanatics. Everywhere they tend to become, not centers of enlightenment, but simply reservoirs of idiocy. Not one professional pedagogue out of twenty is a man of any genuine intelligence. The profession mainly attracts, not young men of quick minds and force of character, but flabby, feeble fellows who yearn for easy jobs. The childish mumbo-jumbo that passes for technique among them scarcely goes beyond the capacities of a moron. To take a Ph.D. in education, at most American seminaries, is an enterprise that requires no more real acumen or information than taking a degree in window dressing . . . . Their programmes of study sound like the fantastic inventions of comedians gone insane.” — “The War Upon Intelligence,” Baltimore Evening Sun, December 31, 1928.

Damn. Mencken would have been the coolest blogger if he was alive today. Stupid cerebral thrombosis.

Conquer Mexico:

So, I suggest maybe it’s time to conquer Mexico. We’re so intent on freeing 26 million Iraqis from a corrupt, barbaric tyranny. What about 100 million Mexicans? Don’t they deserve a government of the people, by the people and for the people? How about truly free elections south of the border?

Maybe it’s time to free Mexico. And worse, Mexico is proving to be a more serious national security threat to the United States than Saddam Hussein’s Iraq was.

Joe “I heart your border” Farah stars in: Weapons of Mexican Destruction - blinded by self-righteousness.

Como se dice “douche bag” en espanol?

Via LRC.

Evolution Man, or How I Ate My Father:

The Evolution Man follows the struggle of a small tribe of cavemen in northern Africa as they try to keep one step ahead of Mother Nature. This nameless band of pre-humans has many of the same conceits and concerns that we have today: finding the perfect cave for the whole family (hopefully bear-free), keeping a successful marriage without resorting to a swing of the club, and figuring out how to make ends meet in a dwindling economy when Dad’s accidentally burned down the nearby forest.

Stephan Kinsella points to a germane quote from PatNews :

“which probably describes the first [fictional] murder for intellectual property… The father of a prehistoric horde of wannabe-humans invents fire making. While the father has an “open-source” concept of intellectual property, the son wants to sell the invention to other hordes, give out licenses and make cross-licensing deals. Finally, the father has to die…”

Independent of any individual mentioned heretofore, my groundbreaking EULA also makes light of cavemen IP chicanery.

Solar super-sail could reach Mars in a month:

A LICK of paint could help a spacecraft powered by a solar sail get from Earth to Mars in just one month, seven times faster than the craft that took the rovers Spirit and Opportunity to the Red Planet.

Gregory Benford of the University of California, Irvine, and his brother James, who runs aerospace research firm Microwave Sciences in Lafayette, California, envisage beaming microwave energy up from Earth to boil off volatile molecules from a specially formulated paint applied to the sail. The recoil of the molecules as they streamed off the sail would give it a significant kick that would help the craft on its way. “It’s a different way of thinking about propulsion,” Gregory Benford says. “We leave the engine on the ground.”

One engineering feat I am curious to know why it was not addressed in the article: numerous space probes like Voyager 1 & 2 use nuclear reactors to generate energy (radioisotopic thermoelectric generator). Why not simply place a reactor somewhere on the craft instead of depending on a large and expensive dish from Earth?