House approves $649b defense budget bill
"The House overwhelmingly passed a $649 billion defense spending bill yesterday that boosts the Pentagon budget by $17 billion and covers the costs of wars in Iraq and Afghanistan."
Monday, July 11, 2011
Tuesday, July 5, 2011
Frank Rich, "Obama's Original Sin"
"For all the lurid fantasies of the birthers, the dirty secret of Obama’s background is that the values of Harvard, not of Kenya or Indonesia or Bill Ayers, have most colored his governing style. He falls hard for the best and the brightest white guys.
...
By failing to address that populist anger, Obama gave his enemies the opening to co-opt it and turn it against him. Which the tea party did, dishonestly but brilliantly, misrepresenting Obama’s health-care-reform crusade as yet another attempt by the elites to screw the taxpayer. (The Democrats haplessly reinforced the charge with marathon behind-the-scenes negotiations with insurance and pharmaceutical-industry operatives.) Once the health-care law was signed, the president still slighted the unemployment crisis. A once-hoped-for WPA-style public-works program, unloved by Geithner, had been downsized in the original stimulus, and now a tardy, halfhearted stab at a $50 billion transportation-infrastructure jobs bill produced a dandy Obama speech but nothing else."http://www.commondreams.org/view/2011/07/04-1
Notes on the Academic Job Market
"Stop Admitting Ph.D. Students"
By, Monica J. Harris, August 18, 2010
"I have served as chair or co-chair of 13 Ph.D. students in my career, a number I’m guessing is typical of most research faculty. Population growth of that magnitude is a Malthusian melt-down in the making and simply isn’t sustainable. We’re not creating enough academic jobs to absorb all those Ph.D.s, and in today’s economy, applied jobs are disappearing as well.
Of course, it is possible, as my coffee buddy assures me, that the market will start improving in a couple of years and we will need all the Ph.D.s we’re churning out. Maybe so, and if it does, I can always start accepting students again. But I’m no longer willing to pin my students’ prospects for their futures on an ephemeral job market that shines in the distance like a mirage."
http://www.insidehighered.com/advice/2010/08/18/harris
"The Long-Haul Degree," The New York Times, April 16, 2010
By PATRICIA COHEN
"Law students get a diploma in three years. Medical students receive an M.D. in four. But for graduate students in the humanities, it takes, on average, more than nine years to complete a degree. What some of those Ph.D. recipients may not realize is that they could spend another nine years, or more, looking for a tenure-track teaching job at a college or university — without ever finding one."
Adam Kotsko, "The ritual satisfaction of stating the Grim Facts about the job market"
Wednesday, October 27, 2010 —My approach has been that the job market is apparently very random. We can follow all the best advice in the world, but it still comes down to the preferences of a handful of people at some randomly-chosen department and the outcome of a power struggle that probably no one outside the situation could ever fully understand or predict. So aside from broad guidelines (try to publish in good journals! present at conferences! get teaching experience! finish!) that 95% of PhD candidates are following anyway, there’s essentially no way of tailoring yourself to the job market.http://itself.wordpress.com/2010/10/27/the-ritual-satisfaction-of-stating-the-grim-facts-about-the-job-market/
Sunday, July 3, 2011
Anthony DiMaggio: Mediated Ignorance
Why Jon Stewart and Politifact are Wrong About Public Misinformation
"Stewart is a liberal pundit operating in the mass media, and his program tends to privilege Democratic and mainstream liberal points of view, while skewering conservative ones. As a result, his limited insights are unlikely to uncover the larger problem in the American political-media system. This larger problem, simply stated, is the consistent correlation between political attentiveness and media consumption across all media outlets, and the corresponding increase in political misinformation resulting from this exposure. ...
Of course Fox viewers display a staggering ignorance; but at the end of the day, that ignorance is not substantively different from that seen among most media consumers."
Phyllis Bennis: Token Withdrawals
"What President Obama announced tonight is not a strategy, there still is no clear definition of a "military victory" in this endless war. In the first weeks after his inauguration, the new commander-in-chief announced he was sending 21,000 more troops to Afghanistan, and "then" he would decide on a strategy. ...That 21,000 was followed, after months of discussion, another 33,000 (it was first going to be 30,000, but you know how it goes…) that made up the official "surge." The first 21,000 apparently weren't to be counted at all. So in his first year in office, President Obama escalated the U.S. troop presence in Afghanistan from a little more than 30,000 to almost 100,000 troops (along with the 100,000 mercenaries) – tripling the troop numbers. With a token pull-back of 10,000 troops over the next six months, and maybe another 23,000 by the end of 2012 (presumably timed for maximum pre-election publicity) that still will leave almost 70,000 U.S. troops in Afghanistan for years ahead – almost twice the number there when he took office. Not to mention the 100,000 Pentagon-paid contractors and 50,000 NATO soldiers, who apparently aren't going anywhere."
Friday, July 1, 2011
And yet who living in this riven, confused, semi-paralyzed country of ours truly believes that, in 2011, Americans can achieve whatever we set out to accomplish? Who thinks that, not having won a war in memory, the U.S. military is incontestably the finest fighting force now or ever (and on a “climb to glory” at that), or that this country is at present specially blessed by God, or that ours is a mission of selfless kindheartedness on planet Earth?
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